Frameless window with controls in electron (Windows)

Question

I want my app to have no title bar but still be closeable, draggable, minimizable, maximizable and resizable like a regular window. I can do this in OS X since there is a titleBarStyle option called hidden-inset that I can use but unfortunately it's not available for Windows, which is the platform that I'm developing for. How would I go about doing something like this in Windows?

Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

Answer 1

Assuming you don't want window chrome, you can accomplish this by removing the frame around Electron and filling the rest in with html/css/js. I wrote an article that achieves what you are looking for on my blog here: http://mylifeforthecode.github.io/making-the-electron-shell-as-pretty-as-the-visual-studio-shell/. Code to get you started is also hosted here: https://github.com/srakowski/ElectronLikeVS

To summarize, you need to pass frame: false when you create the BrowserWindow:

mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, height: 600, frame: false});

Then create and add control buttons for your title bar:

 <div id="title-bar">
      <div id="title">My Life For The Code</div>
      <div id="title-bar-btns">
           <button id="min-btn">-</button>
           <button id="max-btn">+</button>
           <button id="close-btn">x</button>
      </div>
 </div>

Bind in the max/min/close functions in js:

(function () {

      var remote = require('remote'); 
      var BrowserWindow = remote.require('browser-window'); 

     function init() { 
          document.getElementById("min-btn").addEventListener("click", function (e) {
               var window = BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow();
               window.minimize(); 
          });

          document.getElementById("max-btn").addEventListener("click", function (e) {
               var window = BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow(); 
               window.maximize(); 
          });

          document.getElementById("close-btn").addEventListener("click", function (e) {
               var window = BrowserWindow.getFocusedWindow();
               window.close();
          }); 
     }; 

     document.onreadystatechange = function () {
          if (document.readyState == "complete") {
               init(); 
          }
     };

})();

Styling the window can be tricky, but the key use to use special properties from webkit. Here is some minimal CSS:

body {
 padding: 0px;
 margin: 0px; 
}

#title-bar {
 -webkit-app-region: drag;
 height: 24px; 
 background-color: darkviolet;
 padding: none;
 margin: 0px; 
}

#title {
 position: fixed;
 top: 0px;
 left: 6px; 
}

#title-bar-btns {
 -webkit-app-region: no-drag;
 position: fixed;
 top: 0px;
 right: 6px;
}

Note that these are important:

-webkit-app-region: drag;
-webkit-app-region: no-drag;

-webkit-app-region: drag on your 'title bar' region will make it so that you can drag it around as is common with windows. The no-drag is applied to the buttons so that they do not cause dragging.