Visual Style for Windows Explorer hover and selection

Question

The last three versions of Windows have all had translucent highlight and hover effects in Windows Explorer listview:

Using a theme explorer I see that the ListItem has no state that matches what i see in Windows:

Is there a:

class
part
state

that represents the ListView in Windows?

That's probably an issue with "theme explorer". The listview has to have explorer style to have draw that specific look. It needs `SetWindowTheme(hwnd_listview, L"Explorer", NULL)`. — Barmak Shemirani, Nov 09 '18 at 18:04
Maybe not relevant, but do we even know if the explorer "list view" actually *is* a common controls list view control in Windows 7 and later? The window class is simply `DirectUIHWND` these days (black magic). — Andreas Rejbrand, Nov 09 '18 at 20:04
@Andreas AFAIK it is a custom control that just mimics some listview behaviour. The theme can still be applied as shown by 1st comment. — zett42, Nov 10 '18 at 00:23

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 10 '18 at 02:46

For compatibility reasons ListView still has the old style look by default. DrawThemeBackground(htheme, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, ...) will simply draw a solid rectangle with border, for all item states, as shown in above image. GetSysColor should be used to get the right colors for this listview.

A call to SetWindowTheme(hwnd, L"Explorer", NULL) will load the new theme data and draw the list items similar to Explorer. Example:

LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hwnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
    switch(msg)
    {
    case WM_CREATE:
        SetWindowTheme(hwnd, L"Explorer", NULL);
        break;
    case WM_PAINT:
    {
        PAINTSTRUCT ps;
        auto hdc = BeginPaint(hwnd, &ps);
        HTHEME ht = OpenThemeData(hwnd, L"LISTVIEW");
        if(ht)
        {
            RECT rc = { 10, 10, 100, 50 };
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_SELECTED, &rc, NULL); OffsetRect(&rc, 0, 55);
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_DISABLED, &rc, NULL); OffsetRect(&rc, 0, 55);
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_SELECTED, &rc, NULL); OffsetRect(&rc, 0, 55);
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_HOT, &rc, NULL); OffsetRect(&rc, 0, 55);
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_HOTSELECTED, &rc, NULL); OffsetRect(&rc, 0, 55);
            DrawThemeBackground(ht, hdc, LVP_LISTITEM, LISS_SELECTEDNOTFOCUS, &rc, NULL);
            CloseThemeData(ht);
        }

        EndPaint(hwnd, &ps);
        return 0;
    }
    case WM_DESTROY:
        PostQuitMessage(0);
        return 0;
    }
    return DefWindowProc(hwnd, msg, wParam, lParam);
}

Output:

Visual Style for Windows Explorer hover and selection

1 Answers1