How to Add Color and Appearance to Control Panel in Windows  

bamajon1974 said:

Thank you! Those links are quite helpful! Do you have any handy links that explain similar registry keys for other explorer objects like This PC and Navigation Pane? Some representative keys include "localizedstring", "attributes", "foldervalueflags", "delegatefolders", "sortorderindex", "namespace", "inprocserver32". Are there handy guides that explain these keys as well? Thanks!

You're most welcome.

Usually, you can do a Google search for those items, and look at any reference material from Microsoft for more info on them.

bamajon1974 said:

Will do. The links you provided were super handy. I didn't find any equivalent documentation for This PC or Nav Pane, etc. keys though, and you have to wade through less than helpful and vague with quick Google searches.

Thank you!

It is indeed hard to find good official reference material on this that clearly explains everything about it. Most is very general in details when found.

bryand said:

This is great for setting the border color of the currently selected window.
But how do I change the border color for background windows - all but the selected window - they are a basic grey that is very hard to see in dark mode.
How do I change the window border color for non-selected windows?
Thank you!

Hello Bryan and welcome to Ten Forums,

The tutorial below can help change the title bar color of inactive windows to help.

How to Change Color of Inactive Title Bar in Windows 10

rameths said:

I installed this tweak and run into not being able to launch a <whatever>.theme file to activate it ?
this popped up for me on windows 7 , could be my system but new install in virtualbox though

Anyone struck this ?

regards and thanks for so much info

Hello rameths,

Are you able to change the theme from within Personalization settings instead?

The REG file contains this below that adds a unique CLSID key that wouldn't have any affect on that.

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; Created by: Shawn Brink
; Created on: April 13, 2020
; Tutorial: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/154267-how-add-color-appearance-control-panel-windows.html


[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{106ee807-9e5d-451b-a9c5-74908630cefb}]
@="Color and Appearance"
"InfoTip"="Change the color of your taskbar, window borders, and Start menu"
"System.ApplicationName"="Microsoft.Personalization"
"System.ControlPanel.Category"=dword:00000001
"System.Software.TasksFileUrl"="Internal"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{106ee807-9e5d-451b-a9c5-74908630cefb}\DefaultIcon]
@="%SystemRoot%\\System32\\imageres.dll,-197"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{106ee807-9e5d-451b-a9c5-74908630cefb}\Shell\Open\command]
@="explorer shell:::{ED834ED6-4B5A-4bfe-8F11-A626DCB6A921} -Microsoft.Personalization\\pageColorization"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ControlPanel\NameSpace\{106ee807-9e5d-451b-a9c5-74908630cefb}]
@="Color and Appearance"

rameths said:

Im having a further poke as time allows, just had vbox do another run and excluded that reg tweak and it popped up with another string, will do more digging, sory to waste time, though I had found it instead i find myself proven ignorant of what at this time it is, but say thank you for reply, will follow up though :)

Thank you for posting back with your findings so far. I look forward to anything else you may discover.