Change the color of the applications title bar

Question

Hi there,

With Delphi 7 trying to change the color of the title bar of the software from the window theme. I have seen code which allows you to change ALL the title bars of all programs, but I am just wanting to change my program.

Anyone seen/done anything like this? Don't mind paying for a component if needed.

Answer 1

I believe Windows sends the WM_NCPAINT message to an application when it should paint the window frame including the title bar. The default behaviour is to fall back to the default Windows handler which draws the default frame. You could replace this, or re-paint the title-bar section right after.

This looks like a good example: http://delphi.about.com/od/adptips2006/qt/draw_captionbar.htm

Answer 2

The answer by Stijn is not fully complete, as the caption and border of the window will also be redrawn when it is (de-)activated. So in addition to WM_NCPAINT you will also need to handle WM_NCACTIVATE. Unfortunately this can not simply be replaced, as there is other code in the default message handler (apart from drawing code) that needs to be executed. But calling the default handler will in turn lead to the default caption and border being drawn first, which you would then need to draw over with your intended colour, resulting in flicker.

One way to work around this is to adjust the drawing region that the default message handler is called with. See "Drawing titlebar on XP with themes" for an example using Windows API calls that should easily translate to Delphi. Note that this deals only with the text in the caption bar, but the principle applies.

Answer 3

You might take a look at a skinning library. ExpressSkin by DevExpress is a good one.