WinAPI: Create resizable window without title bar, but with minimize/maximize/close buttons (as Firefox/Chrome/Opera)

Question

If you look at the windows of the browsers Firefox, Chrome or Opera, you'll notice that their windows

• have minimize/maximize/close buttons
• are resizable
• but have no title bar

I'm interested: how can I create such a window?

What I have already tried:

I looked around on StackOverflow (and googled, too), and found this: opening a window that has no title bar with win32

Unluckily, this didn't help completely:

The first step was to extend the solution proposed on opening a window that has no title bar with win32

hWnd = CreateWindow(szWindowClass, szTitle, WS_BORDER, 
  CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, 
  NULL, NULL, hInstance, NULL);

SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, WS_SIZEBOX);
// See remarks on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms633545.aspx
SetWindowPos(hWnd, 0, 
   0, 0, 0, 0, // Position + Size
   SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE | SWP_NOZORDER | SWP_FRAMECHANGED);

Of course, this delivers no minimize/maximize buttons, but on the other hand, if I want minimize/maximize buttons, I have to do:

SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_STYLE, WS_SIZEBOX | WS_MAXIMIZEBOX | 
    WS_MINIMIZEBOX | WS_SYSMENU | WS_CAPTION);

Why does this combination seem to be necessary? First I probably want WS_MAXIMIZEBOX | WS_MINIMIZEBOX since I want these buttons.

But http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms632600.aspx says that if I set one of WS_MAXIMIZEBOX and WS_MINIMIZEBOX, I also have to set WS_SYSMENU. And when I set WS_SYSMENU, I also have to set WS_CAPTION but this is not what I want, because I wanted to avoid the title bar (indeed: if WS_CAPTION is not set, no minimize/maximize buttons are shown).

So what is to do?

Answer 1

The programs remove the non-client area (the title bar) and have a bunch of custom handling for reproducing the window buttons, icons, system menu etc. The benefit of this is that they can draw to the new "title bar", which is actually part of the standard client area, adding tabs or other custom controls.

The following two articles will show you how to do this on Vista and above (using the DWM):

• Setting up a custom title bar on Windows Vista / 7
• Setting up a custom title bar - reprise This one has a demo app showing the result of a number of variations / options.

This is very complex to do and get right, so the above two articles are invaluable. The author must have put a lot of work into them! Both links have example code written in Delphi, but it should be easy enough to translate it to C++ - the concepts are identical, it's just syntax.

You might also be interested in general resources on Glass and DWM, since it's all closely related. You'll spot the above two links included in that list :)