Desperately needs a dark mode for file explorer. 

I was wondering that if you can add the Chartreuse Mongoose, Blue Lagoon, and Candy style next update?  

Those themes were never complete and were buggy. I dont think I will be adding those to it.

Maybe the next update. I just rolled out a new update hotfix for Windows 11 Moments 2.

* v3 3-8-2023 UPDATED for Win11 Moments 2 Update
-Skinned Win11 Tabbed frames for watercolor substyle.
-Cropped start buttons to fit 48x48 size limitation.
-Fixed Watercolor taskbar progressbar. (Was using wrong image before this update)
-Fixed taskbar color change mode for all substyles. They should now use the correct color mode.

WOW I have never seen this!!! What incredible work you have done on this Simplex!!

crazy top notch job!!!

Man, I had forgotten how much I liked the Watercolor XP theme.  This is amazing!

The latest update made it even better, but with 200% DPI scaling (good for 4k at 27 inches), there are still a few oddities with tabs.

It feels like the white line between the toolbar and the titlebar is a few pixels too high, like it should line up with the bottom of the concave corner of the tab.

I wont be able to support 4k as I dont have a monitor that allows that type of resolution nor bumping up my scaling to fit that works as anything bigger than 150 on my monitors makes explorer not fit my monitor. Makes it impossible to test those images. Unfortunately because my theme uses a special trick to get the explorer tab section to look right, it will only work with 100% atm and is quite tedious to implement 150%, 175%, & 200%. It will possibly come next update but we will see. Currently working on a separate Classic style. I plan on stripping Classic/watercolor out of this theme and make them their own for recolors. Classic I have done with standard/classic colors. Currently on Brick substyle. This one wont come out till all classic colors are done. around 15ish styles.

ps you might want to put the images you posted on another site and link them back here. Looks like they bugged out. So I cannot see what you have posted.

Here are two screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/dNOWq02

Yeah, thats just a minor dpi scale issue. Wish I could fix it but most graphics from that era were not designed for super high resolutions. Best I can do is get the tab bg section to fit right but thats about all I can do. 150 is the max scaling I believe I made for some things.

Task manager is actually fine, it looks like that due to microsoft adding the search box to the top of the window. It will look like that on any skin you download. I cannot do anything about that as its all hard coded.

The only thing I noticed that was off were the titlebar fonts and the quicklaunch bar not behaiving how stock Windows behaves. Other than that it's basically perfect!

edit: I'm running Windows 7, so the issue is with the eXperience 8 wba file.

Hi! First of all, thanks for the great theme! Unfortunately, there is an issue with the taskbar in Windows 10 that is a dealbreaker for me and makes this theme unusable. The height of the taskbar is wrong, which causes the clock to also display the date and the quick launch icons to be off center. The XP taskbar is 30px high, while the taskbar in this theme is 32. If this can be fixed, I will use this theme on Windows 10 immediately. Thanks

I actually asked stardock about this in the past. The quick launch when you set the taskbar color setting to light or dark will change how it renders the quick launch. Can be replicated without using windowblinds. Nothing I can do about fixing it as it's native to how the os renders it. The fonts on the theme are not tahoma. They looked like a blurry mess when I was trying to set them up. So I left them as segeo ui. If you want tahoma, set the font in WB.

Taskbar height is determined based on large or small icons. I cannot change that. As said in the description, if you want a authentic XP taskbar that you will need to use retro bar. This is just a limitation with the taskbar customizations. As for making it unuseable is a poor choice of words. It's 100% useable and compatible with both windows 10 and 11 systems. If the taskbar button does not fit to the height of your taskbar, than you may be on a higher dip other than 100%. I cannot support higher dpi settings as these older graphics were never designed for that type of resolution nor do I have enough knowledge on how to recreate the button 100% to match the original.

Thank you so much for updating this! 

A big +1 to a darkmode for explorer. I love nostalgia, but blinding white on my PC is so yesterday!

Also I couldn't really get Edge & task manager to work with the title bar skinning despite the shortcut editing and checking options within the WindowBlinds program. Other than that, it looks great - as does the Windows 11 start menu via Start11 - Thanks again.

is there a more aggressive 'force skin' option within WindowBlinds i'm missing? Other than explorer and notepad, everything has it's own skin these days

Task manager and notepad skin fine. If they are not skinning, you might have blocked windows 10/11 applications from skinning. Edge can be skinned, just dont know how to do so since I use firefox.

I did have a look around, but didn't see any options blocking skinning. I even tried adding the exes myself to skin, but that option in WindowBlinds didn't do anything sadly. (Win 11 here)

Make sure you are running windowblinds 11. Windowblinds 10 does not work on win11. Thats what it sounds like you are running based on your issue. If its not working still, create a forum post about your issue to get help from stardock.

Heh, nah I'm on WiB 11. I'll have another crack at it over the weekend - perhaps there was something enabled. Praying for that darkmode explorer update Thanks again for your work ^^

How do I install it?

You need to install windowblinds11 and then you can download it through there or download it here on this page. You double click the wba file and apply it.