BasicThemer2-detours

Hello, I am also very interested in this, and I am curious if you could share your proposed method of getting the classic animation with DWM enabled. I looked at your posts on the topic and you seem knowledgeable.

From what I can tell, the animation is very low-level and is probably baked into user32, though the ReactOS source code certainly doesn't help me find much out about it. As you can observe when DWM composition is disabled, the animation takes rendering priority and other applications won't repaint at all for the duration of the (albeit very short) animation. You also cannot screenshot it with printscreen, doing so will show you the true frame where the application is already at that state instead of the animation. That's why I am under the assumption that it probably won't work well with DWM. The animation being so low-level does make sense though, as it dates back to Windows 95, which needed to pull it off very carefully for the hardware of the time without being choppy.

So my assumption is that it won't really work with DWM enabled. No idea how DWM works, other than that it's a "very fullscreen" DirectX application (if I had to guess, it is responsible for the lowest-level rendering when active). However, the classic animations are unlike classic/uxtheme window frames, as although those are parts of USER, they are still parts of the actual window that get rendered by GDI (specifically, this is called the non-client area, and includes window frames, menubars, scrollbars, etc.), and so DWM is by design compatible with them. In fact, all BasicThemer applications do is that they tell the DWM API that this application shouldn't use DWM to render the non-client area, which is an officially supported feature of DWM. (You might have also seen basic frames in MDI applications like WinRAR ). That's my, albeit somewhat poorly informed, reasoning for why it probably isn't possible.

I am curious to hear any possible solutions, other than making a custom program to emulate it lol