Classic Shell: Forum

Ace port [Classic 1,2, styles]

For CSM 4.3.1 or higher versions of Open-Shell.
100%/96dpi,125%/120dpi,150%/144dpi display sizes.
There are no user picture or name options.


navigatsio made Ace WindowBlinds theme back in 2010:

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/7238

His start menu is a dark coal color, with shallow sunken selectors.



About a third of the looks can't be ported over to Classic Shell start menu. Any option with " * " has strayed from the original looks when using WB on Windows XP.
One being the submenu, which can't have the fine diagonal tile texture as in the main left column.
Trying to fake it just created really ugly interference patterns as the submenu changed its size. Skipped that idea.
I added some noise effect instead. As it's not a constant tile texture size,
the noise particles will stretch and shrink with the size of the submenu. There's an option to reduce it or remove the noise fully.
One other way to reduce the noise size is to switch to "Use single column (scroll)" in CSM "General Behavior" tab.

Due to being a dark blue tinted menu, it's not going to match the neutral color of Win 10 dark mode explorer.

The original low visibility selectors are quite dark and maybe hard for some people to discern sometimes, especially when the taskbar is at the top.
I made an option to brighten them up a little.

I added blue and grey text, arrows, etc. options if yellow-gold does not work for you.
The original submenu text had a black glow behind it. As glow isn't available, I used text-shadow instead. It can be disabled if not required.

When I tried the WB theme on Windows 10, it didn't look so good. It showed parts of the menu using bright yellow square corner portions with the wrong selectors.
I'm sure it is because the theme was never updated to work with newer versions of the WindowBlinds program.
I transferred some of the acceptable looks to this classic-style menu skin. Shouldn't have, but I made the main with a bright option.
I didn't see it in the WindowBlinds Win 10 version. It had bright colored inside programs and search areas with square corners,
but not the bright main left column view.

When I was trying out the WB theme on Windows XP, the menu and taskbar would usually have a 5-pixel gap, and sometimes switch to 1-pixel gap by itself?
I added a main menu docking to the taskbar option with 5-pixel or 0-pixel taskbar gap.


To avoid interference patterns, the taskbar images were made to fit exactly the taskbar height on Windows 10 for 100%,125%,150% sizes.
They would require modifying the height of the images for other systems. If that's too difficult, just use the taskbar image without the diagonal line texture.

As I don't have a high DPI display monitor, it's hard to gauge what size the diagonal lined tile image should be for 120dpi, 144dpi.
Standing back away from the monitor an extra one or two feet isn't very accurate.
If you want to edit the tile png images inside the skin file, they are IMAGE=5 for 96dpi, IMAGE=42 for 120dpi, IMAGE=41 for 144dpi.



EDIT:
Updated to revB

I added the always red hover text option, as well as the Ace logo star color option to this Classic skin.
I also carried over slightly bigger bold Segoe fonts for the submenu jump list/search views.

There is one thing about that Segoe font in general. It does not track properly vertically with increases in display size.
For example, if one sets both Tahoma and Segoe to -9 sizes, Tahoma will be a little higher than Segoe at 96DPI.
Switching to 144DPI, Segoe will look higher vertically compared to the Tahoma font. Segoe switched sizes!


I see in the skinning tutorial:

[By default the fonts are scaled with the DPI at 100%. You can overwrite that:

Main_font="Segoe UI",normal,-9,50%]

I have never really tried adding that lower number percentage value after the font size.
Might be something to look into.

ACE port [7 style]

I was going to list all the 7 style items that couldn't be transferred over to CSM,
as well as the ones that can be, but were skipped. Changed my mind on that big list.

It is what it is. Here you go.


EDIT: Crikey.
Looks like I forgot to add all the list font text, so all the larger sizes of the list fonts stayed the same tiny xp font size.
Fixed. Now rev B