Change the inactive selection colour

firejordan · 23 Feb 2010

Hi all,
I'm having some trouble customizing one key part of my desktop. I frequently work in 2 or more open windows side-by-side or tiled or some other arrangement, often referring to one of the inactive windows. For example if you open 2 explorer panes and drag each to either side of the desktop so they're both filling one half of the screen. Now click on an icon in one pane, see how it's highlighted in blue (or your theme's easily definable colour), then if you click on and make active the other pane that highlight around the icon you just clicked on turns to an extremely light grey... as hard as I search in Control Panel and the Window Color and Appearance settings I can't find a selection box for this colour.

To clarify its the colour of the selection in the inactive window I want to change, not the colour of an active selection.

Thanks in advance!
FireJordan

Ivo · 23 Feb 2010

According to this: • View topic - Group Images 600, the image is either 630, 631 or 646 from aero.msstyles.
But keep in mind that if you make it too dark the black text on top of it will be harder to read.

firejordan · 24 Feb 2010

Yup excellent I can see that this guy has identified exactly what I was hoping to alter, even down to the boxes around pictures and icons when inactive, now how do I actually change the colour myself? I'm afraid I'll need pretty basic step-by-step help here guys.

I literally want to make it either a kind of blue-grey or a slightly darker grey, I'm assuming I'll need some sort or colour code for this? And do the numbers he's talking about refer to the registry or something? If so, how do I do that?

firejordan · 24 Feb 2010

Anyone? Ivo, do you know what the information given on that link means? And how I can use it?

Ivo · 24 Feb 2010

I don't want to repeat what's been said dozens of times in this forum. Just search for "aero msstyles edit". On a high level the procedure is:
- make a copy of the Aero theme
- modify it (export the PNG images using Resource Hacker or similar, edit with Photoshop or similar, import back)
- hack the system to accept custom themes
- switch to your theme

Change the inactive selection colour

Anybody know how I change the inactive selection colour