PureBasic Forums - English

Please add dark mode for all windows, including the various debugger windows, Preferences etc..., light windows bother my eyes and I think many other users would prefer to have all parts of the windows with dark colors, thank you

Can't be done because Win32 exes (which PureBasic creates) don't support dark mode. You can thank Microsoft.

The closest you'd get is if someone could show how to use the window magnifier API to make a window a realtime negative of itself, which I've seen other products do.

Shouldn't it be "easy" to integrate ChrisR's ObjectTheme into the editor?

I've got Darkmode in Linux. Just switch to the "Dark Mode" color scheme in the IDE settings. And of course also enabled your preferred dark mode in Linux too.
Isn't the same possible on Windows?

NicTheQuick wrote: Tue May 20, 2025 11:07 am I've got Darkmode in Linux. Just switch to the "Dark Mode" color scheme in the IDE settings. And of course also enabled your preferred dark mode in Linux too.
Isn't the same possible on Windows?

Yes, it change the editor color, tool panel color etc.. but all other part of the windows(windows border, menu, toolbar etc...) remain white/lightGrey, preferences windows remain of a lighter color, same for debugger windows, until a few years ago I never had a problem with light colors, but complicit with advancing age my eyes are not what they used to be and light colors bother me, and I don't think it's impossible to make windows appear dark colored, there must be a way through windows api

Yes in linux work with dark theme too.
I put this post in whishlist section saying same (may 7)...

viewtopic.php?t=86881

+1 I would like to have a blue dark theme .

I was just about to search for Dark mode in PB Editor (for Windows) as well.
So, I would like to echo that request and give a...

+1

As long as I'm not forced to use dark mode....

Windows Standard Controls Not Supported Dark-Mode. Only DotNet Framework. Thanks Microsoft ...

Is it about the IDE?

Does any of this help? Microsoft article "Support Dark and Light themes in Win32 apps" from 2024...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windo ... ows-themes

It monitors the system colors and performs a basic "is this color dark" check to detect a dark theme.
This is something I've sort of done before, for example here: https://github.com/kenmo-pb/includes/bl ... STheme.pbi

Then you can apply a dark title bar, if appropriate, with DwmSetWindowAttribute(), something I've never done before.

Then... it pretty much ends there, they don't discuss ways to apply a dark theme to Win32 controls.
It seems roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of PB Gadget types support SetGadgetColor(), so a PB module could automatically adapt some gadgets, but not all, without some custom drawing it seems.

Good old Microsoft. What's the point of having a dark title bar only for Win32 apps, and not the entire window? Pointless.

Properly supporting darkmode for Win32 is very difficult, I don't know why MS doesn't do it out of the box. The best way IMHO is to use a third party tool like https://github.com/ChGen/DarkEnforcer . This project has a DLL named DarkDll.dll which seems to do the hard job with a hook, may be it's possible to load it from a PB program and use it to add dark support.

MS messed up big time with their GUI framework. Apple knows how to update and maintain its UI and keep it consistent across the OS and apps. MS? Nope. Every modern framework is an over-engineered inefficient mess. WinUI3 also goes nowhere and is not even usable from plain C.