On Win 10, paint.net assumes inactive window titlebar is white

[pkasting]

On Windows 10, paint.net assumes the inactive window titlebar color is white, and draws its window title string with that background color.  The inactive titlebar color should be computed by checking for two registry keys in HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\: if ColorPrevalence is set to 1, and AccentColorInactive exists, the latter key holds the inactive window titlebar color.  If either of these fail, the inactive window titlebar color is white.

 

Attached is a screenshot of how paint.net appears when inactive on my system (where these keys are set).

[Leito]

Sorry for bumping, but this issue still exists. Another screenshot using the dark theme:

 

 

In my case, those are the relevant values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\AccentColorInactive = ff333333
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM\ColorPrevalence     = 1

 

Can you acknowledge this bug? Any plan to fix it?

Edited February 19, 2019 by Leito

[Rick Brewster]

It's kind of hard to test Paint.NET with settings that can only be obtained by editing the registry, especially since there's no documentation from Microsoft, no support from them, and the fact that these things can change or be removed with any update with no warning or acknowledgement. I've only developed and tested with what you can get by using the Settings and Control Panel. Only a very small number of people are doing this, and so the priority of looking at this is not high.

 

So yes, you could say this is a "bug" but not really. You're hacking the registry to get Windows to do something that it's not really supposed to do, that it's not tested to do, that might not even work, and that would take away time from much more important things.

 

If you can find me with some kind of developer documentation, even some blog post, then I might be able to look at this in the near-term. Something with actual working code. But I'm not going to spend hours tracking down anecdotes from people who're just hacking registry keys and posting their findings. 

[Leito]

(sorry for the late reply)

 

This method has been present in Windows 10 since the Threshold 2 release (version 1511 - November Update  - Build 10586). Here are a few blog posts documenting the registry change, showing that it's quite known :

• https://www.howtogeek.com/258162/how-to-add-color-to-inactive-title-bars-in-windows-10/
• https://winaero.com/blog/change-color-of-inactive-title-bars-in-windows-10/ (this change can be done with the WinaeroTweaker program)
• https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/32118-change-color-inactive-title-bar-windows-10-a.html

I totally get what you're saying though, and that Microsoft could remove this "functionality" with any major update.

[Rick Brewster]

Thanks, that's the type of info I need

[Rick Brewster]

Try the 4.2.1 beta, it should work now 

 

[Leito]

Thanks. I see no change in 4.2.1 beta 7152 though:

 

[Rick Brewster]

Show me your settings in Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM

[Leito]

[Rick Brewster]

Works totally fine here ... my settings are exactly the same as yours.

 

... Do you have Tablet Mode enabled or something?

[Leito]

37 minutes ago, Rick Brewster said:

... Do you have Tablet Mode enabled or something?

 

Not at all. Nothing specific that I can think of.

[Rick Brewster]

Can you send me the diagnostics info?

 

Settings -> Diagnostics -> Copy to clipboard (button)

 

Then paste the results here

[Leito]

Sure:

Application	paint.net 4.2.1 (β 4.201.7152.40366)
Build Date	jeudi 1 août 2019
Expiration Date	jeudi 24 octobre 2019
Install type	Classic
	
Hardware accelerated rendering (GPU)	True
Animations	True
DPI	96 (1,00x scale)
Language	en-US
	
OS	Windows 10 Pro x64 (10.0.18362.0) (0x30)
.NET Runtime	4.0.30319.42000
Physical Memory	16 326 MB
	
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz
    Speed	~3192 MHz
    Cores / Threads	6 / 12
    Features	SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4_1, SSE4_2, AVX, AVX2
	
Video Card	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
    Dedicated Video RAM	4 043 MB
    Dedicated System RAM	0 MB
    Shared System RAM	8 163 MB
    Vendor ID	0x10DE
    Device ID	0x13C2
    Subsystem ID	0x113110DE
    Revision	161
    LUID	0x0000AA41
    Flags	AcgCompatible, SupportMonitoredFences, KeyedMutexConformance
    Graphics Preemption	DmaBufferBoundary
    Compute Preemption	DmaBufferBoundary
    Outputs	1
    Feature Level	Direct3D_12_1
    DXGI Formats	A8_UNorm, B8G8R8A8_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_Float, R32G32B32A32_Float
    Buffer Precision	UNorm8bpc, UNorm8bpcSrgb, UNorm16bpc, Float16bpc, Float32bpc
	
Video Card	Microsoft Basic Render Driver
    Dedicated Video RAM	0 MB
    Dedicated System RAM	0 MB
    Shared System RAM	8 163 MB
    Vendor ID	0x1414
    Device ID	0x008C
    Subsystem ID	0x00000000
    Revision	0
    LUID	0x0000B533
    Flags	Software, AcgCompatible, SupportMonitoredFences, KeyedMutexConformance
    Graphics Preemption	InstructionBoundary
    Compute Preemption	InstructionBoundary
    Outputs	0
    Feature Level	Direct3D_12_1
    DXGI Formats	A8_UNorm, B8G8R8A8_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_Float, R32G32B32A32_Float
    Buffer Precision	UNorm8bpc, UNorm8bpcSrgb, UNorm16bpc, Float16bpc, Float32bpc

 

[Rick Brewster]

What happens if you...

 

1) Exit Paint.NET

2) Re-run it as Administrator? (right click on it -> Run as Administrator)

 

and then:

 

3) Exit Paint.NET again

4) Run it normally?

 

 

[Rick Brewster]

Also, if running as admin doesn't help (and for the record, that isn't meant to be a solution for you, but rather a debugging aid for me), try opening PowerShell and run this command:

 

Get-Item -path HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\DWM

 

And see if there's a difference when running PowerShell normally, versus running PowerShell as admin.

 

I get something like this:

 

I don't think you'll see different values, but maybe you'll see an error.

[Leito]

9 hours ago, Rick Brewster said:

What happens if you...

 

1) Exit Paint.NET

2) Re-run it as Administrator? (right click on it -> Run as Administrator)

Title bar still white.

9 hours ago, Rick Brewster said:

and then:

 

3) Exit Paint.NET again

4) Run it normally?

Same thing.

 

PowerShell returns the same values being run as admin or not, no error:

[toe_head2001]

Yours shows a property named AccentColorInactive that Rick's didn't.

[Rick Brewster]

I had temporarily deleted my reg key before I took that screenshot; it doesn't mean anything

[Leito]

I confirm this is fixed in 4.2.1:

 

 

Thanks a lot!