Yep, would be nice to not have window borders wouldn't it? It's a shame, but we're stuck with them, and to get rid of them, we'll need yet another application to do it Should certainly have been a built in feature of Windows, it really should have. If at the very least, it should be a feature built into Displayset, that would be nice

i can't believe there isn't any possibility
do you often ask ppl @ msdn or other places about modding? does it worth to try it?

Well, now I'm an optimistic individual, always like to believe there is a way, and who knows, maybe, just maybe, there's a reg key/value that one could insert into the registry, and it might would work, but, what would it be? How would you find out what it would be? I just haven't a single clue.

MSDN? No info there, not for something like this, that I know of anyway

There's this RegKey,
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Windowmetrics
but no luck with it... setting the value for the border style to 0 or -0 leaves you with the default border style...
Maybe deleting the entire border key would do the trick, who knows? who tries? (I'm not on my comp, so won't mess up things here )

Yeah, I've messed with that key myself, no luck here either. I haven't however deleted the entry, and I think I just might do that Good idea extatic I'll report the results soon.

Don't forget to make a backup of your registry... just in case...

Oh yes, backup will be made I learned long ago, and learned the hardest of ways, to always back up. lol

my boss has a saying: back it up, or pack it up!

what does it mean? i'm not english.

means back up your software, or suffer the consequences of a crash with no restore point.

Hmmmm...

Seems you can do it to some extent by removing the WS_CAPTION in ResHacker, but then, things get a little weird... I tried with calc.exe, : no borders, but a wrong placement of the items on the dialog (buttons were displaced on the right and cut off). And, strange thing, I still had the titlebar...
Maybe we should investigate this way?

I think removing all the borders on all dialogs and windows would imply a great, great work. Under Linux, you can "theme" your windows in two different ways : "motif" (with borders) and "next" (without) : this is specified in the file that describes your theme... Maybe such a thing is written somewhere in Windows, but I'm wondering where...

Have you tried modding your registry, WinT?

I haven't yet extatic, me has been busy, and honestly, I forgot to delete the reg value I will do that though, really, me shall

The reason you still had the titlebar by the way, after you removed the WS_CAPTION style, is because you must not have removed the WS_SYSMENU style. The sysmenu style is responsible for the caption buttons, where the caption style is responsible for just that, the caption.

If you remove both of these styles however, you will not be able to move the dialog around on the desktop. It will just be stuck right where it pops out when you call it up, which is no good

I do wish we had the "Linux" style of freedom too man, that would be really nice

i think it won't do anything if you delete the reg value - it will load the default setting.

the skins in window managers for linux are similiar to the windows skins/visual styles. i think there's no more freedom.

the reshack procedure would be a pain in the ass. and there are a lot of apps you can't hack the main window but the dialogs.
simply i can't believe it's impossible to set the visibility (but the colors) of borders and the 1 pixel 3Dlines (ButtonShadow, ButtonDkShadow, ButtonLight, ButtonHilight). I don't understand it.
At least we would have an RGB code for the 'transparent color' that would be fun (and surrealistic).

and how did they find the ButtonShadow entries? If an object has a colorsetting it must have a sizesetting too - i hope
these so called regtweaks are just settings for hidden values. i think tweaking means other.

i really wish we had some greater control over the borders ala linux as well, but we don't. this is due to that fact that 'windows' as such are treated far differently in linux than in windows.

in windows, the creation and handling of the non-client area ( the border, titlebar, etc ) is handled at the same time as the rest of the window. the application in fact specifies what type / style of window is created. windows bascially treats both the non-client area and the client area as one, and does the processing for both. seperating the non-client area from what's inside is difficult... it involves hooking into every non-client procedure ( paint, mouse events, )and handling the messages yourself. a look into this process generates a lot of respect for projects such as shellwm.

in linux however, the actual process for a windowed application involves only what we know in windows as the client area. the window manager is then totally responsible for everything that could be considered non-client area - the borders, the titlebar, grippers, right down to handling, moving and resizing the appication. ( sometimes you can see evidence of programs that interact poorly with the windowmanager - not resizing properly, etc. funny enough, one of the main graphical apps on linux for configuring, linuxconf, is absolutely terrible for this. )

so the upshot of all of this is that there is about 100% more freedom in 'skinning' linux windows - simply write a new window manager and handle it yourself. heh.. really though, there is as much freedom in linux skins as the developers of whichever window manager have allowed... some are limited solely to colours and size ( blackbox ), while others are graphical and allow you to do almost anything ( enlightenment ).

i've been rambling again...

i understand very vell, thank you for your reply, methodik.
my last question: in windows, the non-client area has default settings, hasn't it? and we can change these settings through registry, DP or 3rd party apps like DisplaySet. but windows lacks some featuresettings or has some features those have only one kind of setting - something like that. that is why we can't set the size of 3Dobjects but its colors.

i tried shellwm and i decided i wait for later releases.

uhm... if you dont want window borders on your color schemes... make the border colors (light/dark/etc) all the same color as your window color...

vivi, we got that one long ago man, everyone knows that trick. The goal of this thread was to get rid of them entirely, one reason being, if using the old trick, still, you set your titlebar colors to something different, you've got 1 pixel's worth of your 3D Object Face color going around it, which sucks Get it now? Deletion of the border, delete, delete vivi! delete man! Always think delete!

Uh... eFX can be used to do kill borders. Usually it does it when it shouldn't, but it's getting pretty good at the entire process anyways.

Assuming, of course, that you can LIVE with that much additional junk clogging up your wonderful and valued system, et cetera, et cetera.

Exactly, values system resourced, I couldn't agree more. I'm sure ShellWM does a great job of it too, probably more stable then EFX, as it never ran good for me, but come to think of it, neither did ShellWM, but it's been updated now

I won't run it though, just not my thing at all. It's nice, but just not something I care to allow any RAM consumption

Ok, ShellWM has come up, so I gotta start preach'n.

If any of you have tried ShellWM and found it buggy in anyway, plz help it out and file a bug report. The program is under intensly active development currently. The more you report bugs found, the more stable it will become.

Resorce usage will be tweaked soon. No point in it until the app is fully stable. That is also arround when other skinnable parts will be added.

As for if it's not your thing, that's cool, but you it would be a big help to others if you report any problems you find. OSunds like the main complaints are ram usage. Out of curiousity, what reang of memory would you consider tolerable for this type of app? (0-3 megs, 3-6 megs, 6-9 megs, 9-12 megs, 12-15 megs? (any more is a bit much IMHO))

Getting back on topic, this is something you can question on or request. Can't hurt, and it may make for a more versitile app in the long run.

Sorry for taking things completely off topic for a moment. THings where leaning toward ShellWM and how good it is, and I realy want to see it improve. I have to admit I can't use it right now, but I'm hoping that will change soon.

0-3 megs of RAM consumption, and I'm good

0-3 megs on WinT's PC,.. so that would be 12-15 on normal PC's.

SORRY WINT! I just couldnt resist ;-) I think 6 megs or so would be ok, i dont use ShellWM btw, only to test & to play with it :-)

They're getting close then. Currently running the august 8 build with half a dozen windows open and it currently has had a peak memory usage of 3.76M (and a meg in swap, not sure if that's part of said memory usage or not). Oh, and 0% CPU usage no matter how much I resize the windows.

To give you a comparison, that's about the same amount of memory Notepad uses.

They're getting there. Slowly but surely.

Yeah, that's not bad at all.

i had an idea after i redownloaded the Windows Transparency software from here. it looks like a demo software that is able to make windows transparent by it's pid. the most interesting it can make transparent a specified color of the selected window.
i set different colors with DisplaySet for the windowborders(borders+3deffects) and i set transparency for these colors with this software. i could make transparent windowborders but the only problem was the 3deffects on buttons, scrollbars became transparent too. it looked weird.
well i'm just learning its source code - i'm a newbie so i won't find a solution soon but i want a software that is able to make transparent the windowborders. maybe it should work like Y'z Shadow. i don't know yet.

unfortunetaly it would work only on w2k/wxp but surely you all know it.

Welcome back! :-)

I investigated on this borderless thing.
The SetWindowLong Function could help.

Something like this:
SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, GetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE) & ~WS_BORDER);

But it doesn't work for all windows without a .dll that intercepts window creation messages.

If there's a c++ developer reading this thread and would help me to try coding this small app (because i'm an absolute beginner), please reply!

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