How to? TCMD themes - any additional ones available?

[kb6ojs]

I've been looking through the available Themes that are built into TCMD, and I really like the detail that JPSoft has put into making them really look professional. Thank you for that special touch!

(For those who aren't familiar with this special touch, see: https://jpsoft.com/support/take-command-themes.html?highlight=WyJ0aGVtZXMiXQ== for details.)

A lot of products out there have provided a means for users to develop their own custom themes and make them available for downloading and adding them into one's installation. I've done some searching around here on the website but I can't seem to locate information about doing this with TCMD. Is there a provision for this, and if so is there some documentation on how to go about it? Even better, is there a "secret repository" out there somewhere where one can find such special themes and instructions on how to implement them?

Come on, you can tell me, I won't spill the beans!

Thanks, and thank you to Rex and the rest of the JPSoft folks for this cool feature!

//Steve//

 

[rconn]

The themes are resouce dll's (in the Styles subdirectory). They are built from *.ini files that define the RGB colors for each display element. For example, the statusbar definition looks like this for the Windows 11 dark theme:

[CommandBars.StatusBar]
TextColor = 222 222 222
TextGrayColor = 98 102 106
BackgroundColor = 28 28 28
ButtonBack = 28 28 28
ButtonBackPushed = 102 102 102
ButtonBackChecked = 102 102 102
ButtonBackHighlight = 77 77 77
ButtonTextPushed = 222 222 222
ButtonTextChecked = 222 222 222
ButtonTextHighlight = 222 222 222
GripperDark = 68 68 68
GripperLite = 179 144 188

There isn't a secret repository anywhere with additional themes.

To build new themes, you would need to modify one of the .ini files, then use Visual Studio to build a new resource dll. But there wouldn't be any way to insert it into Take Command unless you overwrote one of the existing themes.

It wouldn't be too difficult to add the ability to read new themes to Take Command; nobody's ever asked for additional themes before and nobody's expressed any interest in writing one of their own.

 

[kb6ojs]

Thanks, Rex. It was more of a curiosity rather than a serious pursuit. I've seen some really creative work done by the folks at Stardock with their Object Desktop components, so I thought maybe there was something here. I didn't really think there was any "secret repository" but thought I'd ask just in case, Thanks for the fast reply, and Merry Christmas to all!