How to change the colour of the highlight of selected text in
Windows 10
by Phil Jones Computers
February 2016
What's this?
A customer asked for the highlight of selected text in Windows 10 to be
a darker shade of blue. The default in Windows 10 is a lighter shade of
blue for the highlight (aka text selection background) and white for
the selected text. The customer said there was not enough contrast
between the two and asked for it to be more like it was in Windows 7.
In Mozilla SeaMonkey Mail 1.x, this is used for the selected email
message in the Header Pane.
How to do it in Windows 10
In Windows 10, the registry keys in My
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors are disregarded by
the operating
system. They are still there, presumably for compatibility with old
programs, but their values are not observed by Windows 10. That is why
the Advanced Appearance dialog has been taken away; these
registry values
are now ignored so there is no reason for the
dialog to exist.
Instead, a theme file is read to obtain the necessary settings. The
advantage of a theme file is that it is readily sharable. So a theme
designer can compose new colours for the Windows 10 desktop and the
user can install them via "Get more themes online" without having to
import registry values. The disadvantage is taking away the user's
ability to customise all of their Windows desktop colours.
Therefore... here is a little theme file to bring back
old-Windows-alike white text on blue background selected text.
- Download this theme file (zip
archive).
- Open "rons-theme.zip".
- Copy Ron.theme to C:\Users\[your
name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes
- Go to Settings -> Appearance -> Themes.
- Click on "Ron's Theme".
- Wait a moment while the theme is applied.
- That's it! Please enjoy your dark blue highlight of selected text.
To change the theme
Want a different highlight colour? The file Ron.theme is a plain text file
that can be opened using Notepad. To open Ron.theme for editing, right-click
on it, then choose Open with, then click Notepad. Don't see Notepad? In the
Open with menu, click Choose default program, then you should be able to select
Notepad from the list.
In the Ron.theme text file, the values that set the highlight colours look like this:
[Control Panel\Colors]
Background=58 110 165
Hilight=8 34 108
HilightText=255 255 255
Hilight sets the selection background colour in Red Green Blue values so dark blue is
8 34 108. HilightText means the colour of the text within the selection so white is
255 255 255. Save the change to Ron.theme using Notepad. Apply the theme again and
the change should take effect.
Did this work? Let me know. Please use the form on my main page here.