AutoHotkey Community

[philou]

I've been trying to create a rather sophisticated GUI, where I need to use Tabs and ListViews
and would really like to be able to use +BackgroundTrans on my various controls.

The current situation just looks ugly, to be honest.

This is a call to the Windows API tinkerers, to the COM wizards and DllCall masters - help me and everyone concerned about cosmetics to get the look right.

We could:

• Try to find a way to use transparent backgrounds for controls with the existing Tab control
  
• Try to find a way to use a non AHK Tab control via DllCall, provided this would help with BackgroundTrans
  

[philou]

Whoohoo. First and only bump, since no one seems to care about GUI.

[Mkbailey755]

http://www.autohotkey.com/download/smartgui.zip

[Lexikos]

For something similar to +BackgroundTrans on controls that don't support it, you'd have to subclass the control and manually render what should be behind it. For some controls, you'd have to take complete control over rendering. In short, it can be very difficult.

Also, different versions of Windows have different "quirks." For instance, on Windows XP, the first column of a ListView control always renders a plain-coloured background, covering up (part of) whatever background you rendered.

The ListView's built-in support for backgrounds is also a little inconsistent. Tiled backgrounds, for instance: on some versions of WIndows, they scroll when you scroll the ListView; on other versions, they are static.

I started to write a function for custom ListView backgrounds a while back, but dropped it because of the aforementioned problem with XP. (I use Vista, but XP seems more common.)

This post may be of interest to you. (Set tiled background image from file or URL.)