Hi folks, So I have been playing with making my own custom themes, as many here have done. However, I wanted to do a little more, and in the process I solved some of my own confusions but brought up new ones.
So I wanted to post my process here so hopefully some of you can help me improve what I am doing. I have jumped into the world of editing the.theme files and (potentially) the.msstyles file, but would love some help decoding some of it. I can find almost no guides on the latter, and the guides on the former, are clearly not written for Windows 10 because not all of the attributes are the same, and even then not everything is explained completely.
A lot of this I could probably figure out if I spent many hours tweaking one thing at a time to see the result but hopefully others already have the knowledge. (For the purposes of this post I will use the moniker 'NEWTHEME' to indicate the name of the theme I have been working on). My primary goal was a simple slide show background, and I used the method explained in these forums, about saving a theme for sharing. However, I am using photos of all different sizes, so they are made to fit the screen but the background color is visible. I was not happy with any of the available background colors. So I navigated to the Theme folder (%User% AppData Local Microsoft Windows Themes) and that is where you will find folder for all of your installed themes.
So inside that folder I went to the folder NEWTHEME and inside there was another folder holding all of the slide show images, called 'DesktopBackground,' as well as the file NEWTHEME.theme. Opening the.theme file, I was able to navigate to the 'Control Panel Colors' and change the background color, and it worked great. Of course, I had no way to compile this new.theme file into the.themepack file that is used to install the theme on various machines. So I wrote a small batch file which could be run from any thumb drive and would install the theme as well as copying the modified.theme file to the proper location, and it worked perfectly. That batch file (which was in the same folder as the.themepack file and the altered.theme file) was as follows. Start NEWTHEME.deskthemepack TIMEOUT /T 4 xcopy '%dp0NEWTHEME.theme'%localAppData% Microsoft Windows Themes NEWTHEME /y start ' '%localAppData% Microsoft Windows Themes NEWTHEME NEWTHEME.theme' exit That did exactly what I wanted - it installed the new theme, copied the altered.theme file, and then by running the altered file it refreshed the screen.
The timeout command is to accommodate slower machines, to ensure that the file is actually created before the altered one is moved to replace it. Of course, it should have worked without copying the file-simplying running the altered file should work.
However, if the user at any point switches to a different theme and then tries to switch back (in the Settings-Personalization-Theme-Theme Settings window) it would recall the original, unaltered file and no have the background color I want. However, then I realized that I really want the Taskbar and Start to use the same color as the background, and I want transparency enabled.
Tokens in batch file. How can the answer be improved? Batch file FOR /f tokens. This reads a file line-by-line, removing leading spaces (thanks, jeb). Sets then the line variable to the line just read and. Calls a subroutine that does something with the line. Is the start of the subroutine mentioned above. Will then split the line at /, but stopping tokenization after the first token.
Looking through the.theme file, it seems like these are enabled, but it seems that the.theme file is overridden by the switches in the Settings-Personalization-Colors window. If they are switched off there then it does not matter what data is in the.theme file, it seems. So I modified my batch command to include a small registry tweak to enable them both, resulting in this. Start NEWTHEME.deskthemepack TIMEOUT /T 4 xcopy '%dp0NEWTHEME.theme'%localAppData% Microsoft Windows Themes NEWTHEME /y start ' '%localAppData% Microsoft Windows Themes NEWTHEME NEWTHEME.theme' TIMEOUT /T 1 Reg Add 'HKCU SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Themes Personalize' /v EnableTransparency /t REGDWORD /d 1 /f Reg Add 'HKCU SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Themes Personalize' /v ColorPrevalence /t REGDWORD /d 1 /f taskkill /f /im explorer.exe start explorer.exe exit Which works well and does what I want.
So I should be satisfied, right? Well, I am, for the most part. But I learned one interesting thing, and simultaneously have been brimming with ideas and questions. The cool thing I learned: The whole point of this was to modify the background to a color not available in the Windows 10 swatches. Well, I found that whatever color you set for that stays in the background, and can be available for the next theme you create.
That's confusing. Let me explain.
I created my theme, saved it for sharing and enabled it, modified my.theme file and replaced the original in my computer. So far, makes sense. Then, without manually clicking or adjusting the color settings, I created the theme again and saved it with a different name. Now, here is the cool part-the new theme file I created already had the modified color settings in its.theme file. That's right, I could just run the.themepack file on any computer and it would give me the modified, custom color as the background.
No need to run that original batch file. So, that's pretty cool. It means you can go in and make edits and then if you save everything correctly you can share those customizations without forcing the user to copy an altered file, without running a batch, everything is on the up and up, nothing hacky at all. And if the background color stays the same during this process, I wondered what else would stay the same (and hence no need for editing the.theme file). Such as, if I created a custom theme that used a different.msstyle file, such as the aerolite.msstyle file that is available pre-installed in Windows 10 but somewhat hidden), would that also be saved? I am going to post the altered.theme file now, because some of my questions reference it. The lines that I edited I have made bold, just o make them stick out, obviously the original file has no formatting as such.
Thanks for the reply; I know my post is long, but if you read it you'll see that none of the methods I have used yet mess with msstyles, as I had the sneaking suspicion it was better to work around other ways. And the other ways work quite well, at that! I was just curious if there was anything in there that might be able to be tweaked.
Windows 10 comes with both aero.msstyles and aerolite.msstyles available, though there is nothing anywhere that utilizes the latter. You could enable it and then create a regular themepack, and it should be included in the themepack as the referenced style, so no further hacking would be needed, which might be useful for people who want to build themes around aerolite instead of aero. That way you wouldn't me messing with the contents of the files at all, just referencing a different one. (Edit): PS - You'll notice the bulk of my questions are aimed at getting help to understand how every different variable included in a.theme file affects appearance. You could take a look at this: It's just built-in theme engine, no extra tools or registry changes involved, and the included Readme contains some info about issues encountered. If you manually unpack the.deskthemepack (use something like 7-zip) you can see the raw.theme and all the settings nicely grouped by me.
That's pretty much everything you can use in a theme, but note that many are not used at all by Windows 10. Fun fact: you can now disable the theme service, and since classic/basic style are long gone, Windows 10 reverts to aerolite mode. Changing themes still works, but only just a few settings are applied (like the accent color).
High contrast themes will not work at all. Hi, I have downloaded a theme pack for windows 10 that allows for the text in the title bar to be white. I like the theme pack but I want to be able to edit it and change a color. For example I have changed the title bar color but I would like to make that color universal with other programs. I have included a screenshot of a program I run. The internal windows will change colors depending on the theme chosen.
You can see the difference in the colors of the internal windows vs. The windows title bar. I want the internal to match the title bar. But when I change the title bar colors thinking it will change the window colors in the program, it doesn't. But changing themes will change them.
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Windows customization isn’t anything new, but with Windows 7, customization got a lot easier with theme packs. Here is how you can create your own theme pack from scratch. Creating a theme pack from scratch is a lot more work than using built in tools, but it gives you a lot more flexibility by allowing you to creating brand icons, RSS background feeds, and customizing every feature which may not be easy to do through Windows native tools. When you are going to create a theme that you can share with others you will want to take into account what exactly you will be able to change that others will be able to use.
Msstyles Download
Windows 7 theme packs allow you to customize the desktop background (including “slide show” backgrounds, and RSS feed backgrounds), screen saver, system sounds, desktop icons, mouse pointers, and system colors. Customize your theme.
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