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Any experienced MSSTYLES themers or anyone else know a way to get Windows 8.1 style center title bar alignment? Windows 10 seems to force ALL themes to have left aligned titlebar text (even third party themes that specify centered text in titlebars). This is a departure from Windows 7-8.1 which honored an .MSSTYLES specification for left or center alignment. 

I almost got my Windows 10 UI perfect, I just need center aligned text in titlebars and everything will be perfect UI-wise, I defattened the buttons, got blurry transparency with glass pane reflection, and now I just need ONE more thing: Centered caption alignment. 

 

 

 

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I'm not very sure about that — correct me if I'm wrong — but I think the titlebar text alignment for normal windows (without Ribbon-based UI like in File Explorer or Paint) is hardcoded into the DWM. Maybe you should try to ask the author of Glass8 if it is technically possible to implement it as option in his project.

Same too I really miss a lot how the text was centered in Windows 8/8.1, looked a bit more cleaner and symmetric than left aligned in most situations (never understood that choice from Microsoft since Windows 95). :/

This is something that's handle by DWM, not visual styles. Short answer, no you can't center the text. Long answer, yes you can if you really want to hook on some code into DWM, which is not very easy and pretty risky.

  On 25/08/2015 at 03:23, link6155 said:

This is something that's handle by DWM, not visual styles. Short answer, no you can't center the text. Long answer, yes you can if you really want to hook on some code into DWM, which is not very easy and pretty risky.

Thanks I'll keep that in mind and revisit it when my x86 assembly knowledge advances far enough. I'll probably go that route instead of DLL injection (Which is what Glass8 does: injects a library into DWM). 

The same route as is used by RDP Wrapper and UxStyle basically: changing in-memory offsets using a system service. 
Just another item to add to my "when I am a competent ASM coder I will do ..." bucket list. 

Though once I'm through learning JavaScript I intend to learn a high level language like C++ so I'll explore my possible routes then and might reconsider DLL injection. But I figure I need to harness x86 assembly knowledge to know what it is I need to change first in DWM by analyzing with a debugger. EDIT: I completely forgot DWM and other system binaries have symbol files that aid in finding out things for high level programming purposes. 

Edited by DeusProto
  • 4 years later...

 

  On 23/08/2015 at 18:22, DeusProto said:

Any experienced MSSTYLES themers or anyone else know a way to get Windows 8.1 style center title bar alignment? Windows 10 seems to force ALL themes to have left aligned titlebar text (even third party themes that specify centered text in titlebars). This is a departure from Windows 7-8.1 which honored an .MSSTYLES specification for left or center alignment. 

I almost got my Windows 10 UI perfect, I just need center aligned text in titlebars and everything will be perfect UI-wise, I defattened the buttons, got blurry transparency with glass pane reflection, and now I just need ONE more thing: Centered caption alignment. 

 

 

 

x2scrap7.png

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I'm not a bad Window Skinner, but maybe you can use Windowblinds....

 

In windowblinds there is a Glass8 style, with centred text.

 

If that does not work out, maybe I can try hook you guys up.

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