Win8 Desktop Tweaks

Posted by jhoff80 on August 4, 2012 06:11 pm 18

Desktop mode isn't changed nearly as much as I was hoping it would be to fit the Metro theme. So, I thought I'd post about a few neat things I've tweaked slightly in the (leaked) Windows 8 RTM that I'm playing with, to make desktop mode look better. These should all still work when people eventually get the final version over the next few months.

First of all, in my opinion, desktop mode looks best with the white window color. This can be done by right clicking and doing personalize, obviously. So here's how it looks like that:

If you're on a tablet especially, but maybe just in general, you'll want to now go to the display menu and "Change only the text size" of the title bars to 13. It has the effect of making the minimize/maximize/close buttons larger, which makes them easier to use on a touchscreen. It doesn't work for Office (which you can just turn on touch mode for anyway), but it helps in other apps. That results in this:

And then finally, I also recommend editing the registry a little. In my mind, making the borders thinner make apps feel slightly more Metro-style (or whatever they end up naming it). Go to HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Window Metrics\ and change BorderWidth to '-1' and PaddedBorderWidth to '0' and you'll end up with this:

I also found a decent icon set here to make it feel more Metro. However, it requires manually changing the icon for every single item. Microsoft is really dropping the ball by not doing something like this by default.