How To Change The Color Of The Title Bar In Windows 10

When Windows 10 was still pending release, the many screenshots from its technical preview featured windows with greyish title bars. To anyone seeing them for the first time, they look like an out of focus window. Now that the final version of Windows 10 has rolled out, those title bars have turned out to be part of the new UI and not some bug. The new Windows 10 doesn’t have colored title bars anymore and instead only has a thin one pixel border that is the same color as the taskbar and the Start menu. There’s a little hack going around to fix this though and we decided to test it out and see if it worked, and how well it worked.

The Work Around:

Go to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes. You will see a folder named ‘aero’. Make a copy of it in this exact same location and rename the copy to windows.

Next, open the folder and find the file named aero.msstyles and rename it to windows.msstyles. Next, inside this very folder there should be another one called en-US. Open it and rename the aero.msstyles.mui file to windows.msstyles.mui.

Return to C:\Windows\Resources\Themes and copy the aero.theme file to your desktop. Rename it to windows.theme and then open it with Notepad. You will need to edit a little line inside this file. Find the [Visual Styles] section and edit the line

Path=%ResourceDir%\Themes\Aero\Aero.msstyles

to this;

Path=%ResourceDir%\Themes\Aero\windows.msstyles

Save it. Next, double click the file on your desktop to run and install this new theme, or go to the personalization menu and selecting it. You will not need to restart your system for the change to take effect.

Does It Work?

Yes it does but not well at all. It has many exceptions; it only works for desktop apps so Chrome, File Explorer, and Control Panel will have a colored title bar but the Settings app, Edge, and other Modern UI apps will not. The Modern UI apps suffer as a consequence of this change; their border is now thicker and exceptionally ugly to look at. The Start menu now has a transparent border which looks terrible.

A Desktop App

A Modern UI App

The Start Menu

The Verdict

I’m not going to keep this theme installed. I can get used to the thin bordered windows but that Start menu is hard to look at and so are the Modern UI apps. This hack might ‘work’ in a loose sense of the word but it ruins the UI of the operating system which isn’t something I’m willing to put up with just so there will be colore in the title bar of a few windows. To get rid of this, simply select a different theme in the Personalization window.

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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