Qt working Windows 8 style frameless custom window

Question

I recently installed Github for Windows on my Windows 7 machine and loved the custom frame it had, it fit really well with the overall application theme and had it\'s own ti

Answer 1

If you use Qt::FramelessWindowHint, you lose all Windows frame related features, such as docking, shortcuts, maximizing, etc. You can implement some of them yourself, with great effort in some cases, but other things will still just not work, including handling multiple monitors and all the capabilities of the Windows Key. If you need your app to behave like a regular Windows app, Qt::FramelessWindowHint is pretty much a dead end.

The only real solution is to use the DWM API that Windows provides for this purpose, Custom Window Frame Using DWM. They provide examples of how to do anything you might want in the frame area, while preserving all the standard windows-manager behaviors.

Applications such as Chrome do use DWM for this (see the AeroGlassFrame class in the Chromium source). Granted, Chrome isn't using Qt, so it doesn't have to do the work of sneaking around QMainWindow to handle the Windows-specific messages, and their code has plenty of comments that indicate how messy it is, like:

 // Hack necessary to stop black background flicker, we cut out
 // resizeborder here to save us from having to do too much
 // addition and subtraction in Layout() ...

Similarly, the Github-for-Windows app you mention is built on a platform called Electron, which in turn uses, you guessed it, DWM.

I haven't found any working example of a DWM frame around a Qt application, but hopefully this provides a starting point.