Where it be?

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Years ago I set-up my WinX color scheme using some system service that I can’t remember now.  It gave much finer detail than what seems to presently exist in the Win 10 Settings menus.

For instance, i could do things like set the active window title bar to one color and any other non-active windows onscreen to a different color.  I could also set font sizes and more.

Can anyone tell me what that system app was and how to get to it now (if it is still exists)?

This wasn’t a graphic card app or dialog, btw.

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That was actually a built-in function of Windows up thru Win7.

If you right-clicked an emptty spot on the desktop and selected Personalize, the 2nd option at the bottom was called “Window Color” (it’s simply called “Color” in Win10)

If you clicked it, it opened the following window which allowed you to set all sorts of different options for colors, fonts, icons,etc., etc.)

And while most of the registry keys those settings manipulated are still there and still work, starting with Win8 Microsoft removed users ability to easily access and change them (i.e., like a lot of other things, they “dumbed down” the Color options. )

The good news is, there are a lot of 3rd party add-ons out there that restore a user’s ability to change “most” of those options!

My personal favorite is Winaero Tweaker which also includes a “lot” of other options besides just restoring most of the missing Windows Color options.

1 user thanked author for this post.

ibe98765

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Yes, this is what I was looking for!

The current Win10 options for  customizing the theme are far too basic for my taste.

I do have WinAero but haven’t noticed these settings.  Will look.  Thanks.

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The Appearance and Advanced Appearance Settings sections contain most of them.

It’s been quite a while since I originally set Winaero up on my system, so it’s also possible there might be a few in some other sections as well.

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I just checked out WinAero again. Many of the settings are there but the weakness of Win Aero is that each one is a single item.

Does anyone know of an integrated app that restores this functionality in one place? if not, someone should write one.

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That color setting dialog is still there in Windows 10, as far as I know, but can only be used with High Contrast themes. They are the last remnant of the non-composited themes that were the only type available up to and including Windows XP. Starting with Vista, the “Aero” type themes (meaning anything that used the DWM, including but not limited to the “Aero glass” themes) have their own internally defined colors for nearly everything, with only the new color settings of which you speak available.

In Vista and 7, there was a choice of Aero or Basic/classic themes, with the latter fully obeying the colors set in the old dialog, and the Aero themes using the newer, less powerful color settings, but for 8, the basic/classic themes were dropped. The high contrast themes are the only ones left, as far as I know, and they have serious drawbacks. They are not hardware accelerated and will exhibit significant screen tearing, and they will break the appearance of some programs. They’re also pretty ugly.

When I upgraded from XP to 7, I initially used Classic, but the tearing drove me nuts. I couldn’t stomach using the Aero themes with their hard-coded retina-searing white backgrounds, so I learned how to edit and create Aero themes and made my own. This is not officially permitted by Microsoft (branding, you know, requires “Windows” to look like whatever “Windows” was meant to look like at that point in time, even if this caused eye pain in the user), so enabling my custom theme also required a hack to even get Windows admit the theme existed.

It took countless hours to get it all done, but I did eventually get a Windows 7 theme that worked. I ported that theme to 8.1 when I migrated, and then to 10 (the initial 1507 release), which only worked partially. The next update broke it completely, and that was right about the time I realized that my Windows journey had come to an end. I’ve been using Linux ever since (approaching 7 years now).

It’s an absurdity that the most popular desktop OS in the world requires this level of commitment and work to change something as basic as the window background color.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon

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ibe98765, wavy, oldfry

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Somehow I ended up with the precise colors I wanted for Windows 10, including the background color. I checked my utility folder and found
https://www.wintools.info/index.php/classic-color-panel When I pick a UI element such as background, I can enter the 6 background color numbers I have been carrying around since forever in the old fashioned Windows color picker dialog box.

I do remember it took me awhile to solve my UI color element problem on Windows 10 and I had to do a lot of searching to find this solution. Based on the report from my Internet Security Suite, not a lot of people have discovered this solution, but at least my Internet Security Suite upon lookup in its program database says the colorclassic.exe file is ok to use.

Apparently, I never paid for it: $10 per year.  I used it in the 30-day evaluation period.  I never even bothered to read the documentation on the web site, until now.  There are warnings in the  documentation, so you should read that first, before making any changes.

Windows 10 22H2 desktops & laptops on Dell, HP, ASUS; No servers, no domain.

1 user thanked author for this post.

wavy

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