[WinUI] Use modern title bar

[niels9001]

Multiple applications use XAML Islands that uses a win32 title bar by default. This doesn't provide a modern look and feel and is quite jarring in dark mode.

Once we can adopt WinUI 3, we can extend the content into the title bar and polish everything. As a tracker issue:

• Settings
• OOBE
• PowerRename

[Jay-o-Way]

#732, #6715, #891, #2027

[JaiganeshKumaran]

Why not use a custom title bar with WPF itself?

[crutkas]

@DHowett how do teams internally handle this with islands?

[crutkas]

@JaiganeshKumaran becomes an accessibility nightmare. Rather create better guidance in docs / fix the issue(s) so everyone benefits.

[DHowett]

Folks use DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE to switch their titlebars into dark mode on machines where dark theme is enabled.

Alternatively, people use custom title bars. It is an utter pain with System Islands and WinUI 2.x, so it is not worth doing.

[KingKoopaDE]

I hate that every title bar has a different design these days.
Why not just keep the Win32 title bar and create a uniform look?
And another thing that bothers me is that the new WinUi3 doesn't append msstyles colors and styles nor the HKCU\Control Panel\Corlors Colors.
That's one reason why even Win2k has a better dark mode than Win 10/11.

[JaiganeshKumaran]

I hate that every title bar has a different design these days. Why not just keep the Win32 title bar and create a uniform look? And another thing that bothers me is that the new WinUi3 doesn't append msstyles colors and styles nor the HKCU\Control Panel\Corlors Colors. That's one reason why even Win2k has a better dark mode than Win 10/11.

The default Win32 title bar isn't better either. It has many issues, some of which I have mentioned here: microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#5486. Custom title bars do cause inconsistency and many of them have broken accessibility, however, there's no solution for this currently. I have proposed a new modern default title bar for WinUI 3 which could solve the problem.

[crutkas]

We're working on this little by little. We are actually blocked and waiting for WinUI 3.1 with elevation / multi-window support. Once those features are rolled in and is stable, we'll nab it in a heartbeat.

Settings / oobe needs multi-window.
PowerRename needs multi-win

[WilliamABradley]

@DHowett @crutkas

DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE could be a good stopgap until WinUI support improves.

In the latest insider preview, Mica was added to most titlebars (Although light Mica), but if you used DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE (Like DBeaver just added, see below), you get dark Mica.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/62811758/5001796
It is applied directly to the HWND, so it has no framework dependencies.

[WilliamABradley]

Is this easier now that PowerToys is on WinUI3/WinAppSDK?
DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE would work either way, you just need a PR?

[crutkas]

Only settings is on WinUI 3 currently.

[WilliamABradley]

Using the DWM Attribute doesn't require WinUI 3, I have ported the code to C++ and have it running for PowerRename as you can see in my screenshot.

I could go and do the others and make a PR?

[jaimecbernardo]

Current code base also moved PowerRename to WinUI3. Wonder if that would conflict with your changes. @stefansjfw , did WinUI3 port fix this issue?

[WilliamABradley]

It shouldn't do.

WinUI 3 still doesn't ship with a Theme Aware Titlebar, the discussion in WinAppSDK can be found here: microsoft/WindowsAppSDK#41

A lot of the discussion mentions the use of DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE which is what I implemented here.

This is the workaround until a cleaner solution is implemented.

[stefansjfw]

No. I didn't touch title bar. @niels9001 Gave it a try but there were some issues with Win11 vs Win10 API support

[stefansjfw]

Using the DWM Attribute doesn't require WinUI 3, I have ported the code to C++ and have it running for PowerRename as you can see in my screenshot.

I could go and do the others and make a PR?

Nice! I like how this looks like

[WilliamABradley]

Here is my draft branch I made today, I can also write the support to handle in all the other apps: #18315

I noticed however, I will need to detect and toggle it on and off when the user switches theme, so that is something that needs to be implemented in this approach.

I know I worked with @michael-hawker on Windows Community Toolkit to make a theme detector, so something like that could work.

[michael-hawker]

@WilliamABradley good to see you again! The theme APIs don't work on WinUI 3 the same way, so the nice helpers in the Toolkit for WinUI 3 don't work either.

I don't know if there's a plan for polyfills to be created for WinUI 3 in an upcoming version, or if we'd have to re-write the WinUI 3 version of our helper to listen to the raw windows messages. We wouldn't want to do anything like that until we consolidate our codebase for our 8.0 release as we're trying to merge our forks together.

[WilliamABradley]

Hmm, I might have to play around, also the code is C++, so I would have to re-write the extension anyway.
I'll see if I can come up with something without having to intercept Raw Windows Messages tonight.

[crutkas]

We released 0.60.1 and this is included in it! https://aka.ms/installpowertoys