from the still-hasn't-really-come-over-to-the-dark-side dept.
Some portions of the OS are still stuck on light:
Windows 11 launched way back in October 2021 and has become Microsoft's must-have OS thanks to the impending end-of-life for Windows 10. After all that time, there are still significant portions of the OS that don't do dark mode. However, Redmond is making significant progress, bringing a couple of key dialog boxes into compliance.
As of Windows Insider Build 26120.6972 (beta channel) and 26220.6972 (dev channel) or higher, you can now get the Run and Folder Options dialog boxes to appear in dark mode. However, to make them dark, you need to use the ViVeTool, a utility that enables hidden features.
To enable dark mode in the first place, navigate to Settings-Personalization-Colors and select Dark from the "Choose your mode" menu.
Now, download ViVeTool if you don't have the utility already. Create a folder called C:\vive and unzip the ViVeTool's contents to it.
Launch an elevated command prompt by searching for cmd, right-clicking on it, and selecting "Run as administrator."
In the command prompt terminal that appears, change your directory to C:\vive.
cd \vive
Then enter the following command, which will enable dark mode for the Run Dialog, Folder Options, and also for File progress windows and "are you sure" popups that appear when you try to delete or rename certain files or folders. The latter two dark mode instances were added as hidden features back in August, but they still aren't part of Windows 11's default setup.
vivetool /enable /
id:57857165,57994323,48433719,49453572,58383338,59270880,59203365
After you've entered the command, reboot your computer. You should now be able to see dark mode when you hit Windows + R to open the Run dialog box and in Explorer when you select Options from the ... menu.
You'll also see dark mode in action when you're copying files and watching the progress bar.
And you'll see dark mode when you try to rename or delete a folder that requires a higher level of permissions.
But no, you still won't see dark mode when you right click on a file or folder and select Properties.
And you don't see it when you attempt to rename something you do have permission to access but which requires a confirmation. For example, when I tried to rename cmd.exe to cmd.ex, I got a dialog box warning me about the dangers of changing a file extension, but it was in white.
It's clear that some of the Windows features that don't obey dark mode are legacy apps that Microsoft doesn't really want you to use anymore - all of Control Panel has a white background for this reason. However, we expect Microsoft to roll out more dark mode features to File Explorer and to make those features work in the production builds of Windows in the near future, because the company has no plans to replace its tried-and-trusted file management utility.
[Ed. note: I'd be interested if anyone is familiar with that Vivetool utility and what your impression is]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 30, @02:11AM (1 child)
SN supports "dark mode" out of the box. It's called VT100 mode, over there on the left menu, Preferences.
What's old is new again!
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday October 31, @06:56AM
So there is, under preferences -> homepage tab -> select theme
God this looks ugly...
(Score: 5, Touché) by istartedi on Thursday October 30, @02:33AM (6 children)
Welcome to the future. It's a lot like the past, but stupid.
IIRC Windows 95 would let you choose system colors arbitrarily with the color picker, and even warned you if you were being stupid and choosing something low-contrast.
So congratulations Microsoft on getting back a little of the functionality you had 30 years ago???
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday October 30, @07:59AM
But there's a change control committee for every dialog box nowadays to ensure quality.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 30, @11:28AM (3 children)
I simply don't understand how a product as important and valuable as Windows 11 could be launched missing such simple functionality. Sure, dark mode isn't a make or break feature, but implementation should take a junior level monkey about five minutes per dialog.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Thursday October 30, @02:14PM (2 children)
It should take zero minutes per dialog. That fancy C++ language that's all the rage lets you inherit properties from classes. Each dialog should inherit from the same base classes including the one that has the background colour behaviour. It's C++. It's the future.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday October 30, @04:09PM
I might not even need to know the language. If I had proper visibility in to the system, I could observe where they were pulling the colors from. A registry key maybe? Does Win11 still have the registry? The trick then I suppose is to know when it reads the registry. You don't want to have to re-boot for color changes, so yes access to the code base is better; but if there's a standard Windows message pump to load registry changes you're golden.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 30, @07:29PM
I was talking about the ui test that checked that the mode changes, but yeah, the code literally wrote itself 30 years ago.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 31, @03:32PM
Does the modern version warn you if you try to enable dark mode?
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Thursday October 30, @02:44AM
Meanwhile in Windows 95, every... single... dialog... conforms to the selected color scheme. And it's not just a dozen watered down black text-on-white with different trim, you can change the color of EVERY piece of the dialog and window management. Even to a black background with white text.
Yea, no stupid gradients, or textured backgrounds, just solid color, but you don't need a damn artist to fix the dialogs.
And every commercial application that had the "Made for Windows 95" logo was supposed to conform to those standard. Not that everything did. Lots of crappy application forgot you could change colors and, for example, display hard coded black text on your user selected black background.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 30, @03:26AM (5 children)
"Dark mode." Sheesh. Remember when Windows let you change the colors of anything you wanted? Now you can should between light gray or dark gray.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 30, @03:28AM (4 children)
Sorry, "should" should be "Choose." It's 2025 and SoylentNews doesn't let you edit comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday October 30, @10:54AM (3 children)
Slashcode doesn't let you edit comments for a specific reason: Someone could post something cool, get it modded up, and then edit it into a troll comment and have a wider audience for it.
Editable comments are great when everybody is playing nice. Slashcode grew up in an environment where everybody was not playing nice.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2, Interesting) by acid andy on Thursday October 30, @11:38AM (2 children)
How about when you edit a comment you lose all the upmods? I was going to say it resets the score completely but obviously that would be massively abused.
Lots of sites nowadays let you change an upvote or downvote you previously applied. Is there any reason we couldn't let people change their moderation for a comment here? Well, other than the time and effort coding and testing it of course.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 30, @11:15PM (1 child)
My comment is not redundant. It is a suggestion for a way an Edit feature could be implemented without the risk of misuse. If you remove all upmods when the edit is made, it mitigates the issue the GP identified.
If you are concerned about someone changing the meaning of a comment to alter the context of existing replies, then include a spoiler tag or link that shows the original comment text as well.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @02:38AM
Or make it so an edit is appended (below some sort of horizontal line would do), rather than changing the original comment, and once edited, freeze the comment's moderation status.
I didn't find your idea redundant either, in fact somewhat relevant, as increasingly what used to be flexible is now frozen in an XOR state, either due to abuse (such as can happen with comments) or WTF-are-you-people-thinking as with Windows. Black or white, edit or no-edit.
KDE used to have all that wonderful color flexibility too, but as KDE "modernized" that capability was lost.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Funny) by driverless on Thursday October 30, @05:43AM (3 children)
Just correcting a small error in the summary:
should read:
I don't think anyone wants to have Windows 11, they're forced to have it.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @02:41AM (2 children)
To damn Win11 with faint praise, i find it better than Win10.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Friday October 31, @10:16AM (1 child)
... in the same way that gonorrhea is better than syphilis.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @01:47PM
And both better than the HIV that I predict will be Windows 12. (They've been wanking to the concept of OS by subscription ever since the Win2K launch, where with my own eyes I saw them express this lust. Between ubiquitous broadband and TPM/bitlocker to enforce it, this abusive relationship can now become reality.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday October 30, @06:28AM (2 children)
The insider features are full of telemetry hooks and callbacks since they're in beta testing that might ignore any privacy choices you've made in Settings and the likes since they're meant for people who already approved of joining the insider preview program and agreed to share their usage data with Microsoft.
It just toggles some registry entries per selected feature:
https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe/blob/master/ViVeTool/Program.cs#L391 [github.com]
https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe/blob/master/ViVe/FeatureManager.cs#L261 [github.com]
https://github.com/thebookisclosed/ViVe/blob/master/Extra/FeatureDictionary.pfs [github.com]
You can go through the code to see if it's doing anything naughty before building it yourself or maybe just write the registry entries manually I suppose?
compiling...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 30, @11:40AM (1 child)
If they can't get a display preference rolled out uniformly, what are the odds your privacy preferences are handled any better?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday October 30, @01:46PM
Nirvana fallacy has no place in software when the vendor makes it their business to sell after-market security hardening services [microsoft.com].
compiling...
(Score: 4, Informative) by gnuman on Thursday October 30, @08:50AM
Whenever someone complains about command-line tools for Linux, all we need is examples like this... the command-line on Windows is somehow much much worse.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday October 30, @02:13PM (10 children)
Semi-OT question here: I've yet to use Windows 11 myself.
Have they EVER added the ability for the time in the tray to show seconds!?? That missing feature, which has been in EVERY Linux desktop I can think of forever, has always stunned me.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday October 30, @02:16PM (2 children)
Just look at your wristwatch or your phone.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Friday October 31, @07:21AM (1 child)
What, no love for pocket watches?
They generally last much longer than wristwatches, last orders of magnitude longer than mobile phones and if looked after properly they tend to keep better time than either of those things (or than any computer running Ms Windows).
Only downside is that they're easier than wristwatches for pickpockets to steal (but still not as easy as mobile phones).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 31, @03:37PM
They're more stylish and I enjoy watching youtube videos like "Wristwatch Revival" which, despite the name, has many pocket watch repair videos. If I needed another hobby (which I certainly do not) I'd probably follow in that guy's footsteps.
I've gotten close to buying a mechanical watch several times. I will sooner or later. The innards are so cool! But having watched many watch repair videos, I know they're a very temporary product about as long lived as a fitness tracker.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gawdonblue on Thursday October 30, @08:35PM (5 children)
Yes, it's there. I forget how to enable it, but I stumbled across it somewhere and applied it to my (forced upon me) Win11 desktop at work. Very handy and co-workers are jealous :)
Re Win11 issues: Apart from the telemetry, the worst bit of Win11 is trying to get focus on the correct window. It's like playing wack-a-mole with your mouse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @02:51AM (4 children)
Settings
Time & Language
Date & Time
Show time in the system tray
Show seconds in the system tray
Per a discussion over on ElevenForum, the focus problem is an application-specific bug rather than a Windows bug, which is why some people experience it and others don't. VirtualBox is cited as one of the affected programs.
And there's this tool:
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/prevent-applications-from-stealing-focus [thewindowsclub.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by atwork on Friday October 31, @03:24AM (3 children)
Oh it's the application's fault that the windows disappear?
The same applications that ran fine on Win2000, Win7 and even Win10 without losing focus?
Right...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @04:21AM (2 children)
Only reporting what came up when I went looking. Also found same complaints about Win10.
Something changed, for sure, but could have been a bugfix in Windows that exposed some common misbehavior.
One of the more general problems with Win10/11 is that it's mostly stopped worrying about being backward compatible. Used to be they even preserved Windows bugs (at least as flags to present the bug to programs that depended on it) to keep old software running correctly, but this seems to have gone away.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by atwork on Friday October 31, @05:26AM (1 child)
And now it's Microsoft Outlook hiding Microsoft Edge windows. There's some common misbehaviour!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 31, @06:45AM
Don't even know how to make their own software behave...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Didz on Monday November 03, @11:12PM
It is a setting in later versions of Windows 11.
For Windows 10 it is a registry setting.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 31, @03:39PM
Does anyone like dark mode color schemes?
My only experience with it is shutting it off. Also I have some experience that faulty buggy software will include it as a distractor (sure it crashes every 15 minutes, but we added dark mode, yeah!!! woo hoo!!!)