How to Make Your Own Windows 10 Theme

By Melanie Pinola 27 August 2015

Want to change how your desktop and windows look in Windows 10 and share that design with friends? Windows 10 lets you create your own theme with a custom desktop background, windows border and Start menu accent color. You can save these settings as a new theme file to use over and over or send to others.

1. Open the Start menu and select Settings.

2. Choose Personalization from the settings screen.

3. Change one or more of the following:

• Desktop background: Select picture, solid color, or slideshow. In addition to some default photos, you can click the Browse button to select a background picture. If you choose slideshow, the default album for the slideshow will be the Photos folder, but you can browse to a different folder and also set how often you want the picture to change on your desktop.

• Colors: You can either have Windows automatically pick an accent color from your background or select a color for the Start menu tiles background and the thin border around windows. This will also change the color of the Windows icon in the taskbar when you hover over it. Optionally, you can also have that color shown on the taskbar and Windows 10’s action center by checking those checkboxes.

You can also change the Lock screen background image and Start menu settings here, but these aren’t saved with your theme.

4. Click Themes in the Personalization window, then Theme settings.

This will open up the personalization settings in the Control Panel.

5. Right-click on the Unsaved Theme and select Save theme. The Unsaved Theme appears in the My Themes section and contains the the settings you just adjusted.

6. Give your theme a name in the window dialog box and hit OK.

Your new theme will be saved and you can switch between it and other themes easily by going to the personalization options in the Control Panel. Once your theme is saved, you can also right-click on it and save the theme for sharing as a .deskthemepack file.

Microsoft doesn’t offer a built-in way to create more complex themes than this (e.g., changing app icons or default sounds), but there’s an app in the Windows App Store called Theme Creator that promises to let create a complete Windows theme package. The app crashed on me when I tried it, but you might have better luck.

Also, Microsoft offers many Windows theme packs you can download for free here. Here are some of the best Windows 10 themes.

Making Your Own Windows 10 Theme

By James
Post date

If you are looking for changing how your desktop as well as windows look in Windows 10 and then share that design with friends then no worries as Windows 10 will let you create your own theme with custom desktop background, Start menu accent color and windows border. Now you can save these settings as a new theme file to use again and again or sending it to others.You can also learn about Giving Windows 10 a Dark Theme.

Now in order to create new theme you need to follow these simple steps.

• 1 st of all you need to open the Start menu and select Settings.
• Now you need to select Personalization from the settings screen.
• Now you need to change one or more of the following:
• Desktop Background: For desktop background you can select picture, solid color or a slideshow and for that you can select default photos or you can click on browse for selecting some other background picture.
• Colors: Now you can either have Windows automatically select he accent color from your background or you can select the color for the Start menu tiles background as well as the thin border around windows. This will change the color of the Windows icon in the taskbar whenever you hover over it.
• Now click on Themes in the Personalization window and after that click on Theme settings.
• Now this will open the personalization settings in the Control Panel.
• In the next step you have to right click on the Unsaved Theme and the select Save theme,
• Now is the time to give your theme a name in the window dialog box and then click OK.

With these simple steps your new theme will be created and you can now switch between this newly created theme and other themes easily.

Make and run your own file extension?

I was checking out the files in a old game called Warcraft III and saw that they had files with their own extension, for example, file name.w3x .

How do you make your own file extension and run it?

5 Answers 5

In short: you make your own file extension by applying whatever letters you want to the end of the file name. You run it by telling your OS what program should be called when you double-click on it.

A file extension is actually just the letters after the file, there is nothing magical about the extension. A lot of files I have made when I’m on my Linux machines I have forgotten to even put the file extension on.

That being said, in Windows the file extension is how Windows determines what the file is. If you change the file extension of a .mp3 for example to a .png Windows will think it is a picture when it tries to open it. What Windows does is it looks at the extension and sends the file to an appropriate program related to that file. so .mp3 gets sent to iTunes, .png gets sent to Paint, .html gets sent to Firefox/Chrome, and .docx gets sent to Word.

In terms of the creation of these files, they fall into two categories. There are plain text files ( .html , .txt , .java , .py , .cpp , .config , .xml ) and then there are binary data files (.exe, .mp3, .png) (well, and then there are mixes of binary and plain text like .docx , but they can be treated like binary files). When you are dealing with plain text files (it is plain text if Notepad can open it) it is very easy to do. Depending on your programming language you basically just open a file and read/write strings to the file. With binary files, it gets a little more complicated, but the principle remains the same, you are reading/writing bytes from a file.

To make a file of a particular type executable (by double-clicking on it) is probably the hardest step depending on your programming language. If it is C or C++, you simply point Windows to your .exe and Windows sends the file you wish to open as the second argument in args to your program’s main method. In Java or Python, it is still doable, but you’ll have to work out some sort of workaround to get Windows to open the run-time environment or interpreter and send the file argument to the program.

Create Your Own Windows 10 Custom Themes

In the Windows 10 Creators Update, you can now download Windows 10 Themes from the Windows Store. But in addition to those Microsoft-produced themes, you can also make your own Windows 10 custom themes using the Settings menu. Here is how you can create and use your own Windows 10 custom themes.

Opening the Themes Menu

1. Open “Settings” from the Start Menu.

2. Click “Personalization,” then click “Themes.”

3. This will open the themes menu which allows you to adjust your desktop background, choose theme colors, change your cursor and modify system sounds.

Change Desktop Background

1. Click the “Background” button which displays the name of your current wallpaper underneath.

2. Select the type of desktop background you want from the drop-down menu.

3. If you chose “Picture” from the drop-down menu, you can now select an image to appear as your background. The five most recent desktop backgrounds will appear as thumbnails below “Choose your picture.” You can also click the “Browse” button to select different images from your computer.

4. Finally, you can choose how the image should be displayed under “Choose a fit.”

• Fill: resizes the image (if necessary) to cover your entire background but does not change the proportions of the image
• Fit: fits the entire image on screen
• Stretch: changes the proportions of the image to cover your entire screen while displaying the whole image. This can seriously distort an image.
• Tile: repeats the image as many times as necessary to cover the whole desktop
• Center: centers the image on the screen without resizing or adjusting
• Span: If you have more than one monitor, stretches the desktop background to cover all your displays without repeating. Otherwise it’s the same as fill.

5. If you chose solid color, select the color from the palette or click “Custom color” to select a different color.

6. If you chose slideshow, select the folder to use as a source for your images. You can then select how often the image should be changed, from one minute to one day, and choose whether to shuffle the images.

Change Theme Colors

Colors refers to the accent color that shows up in certain places in the UI. The accent color will affect the background of Start Menu icons, the indicator for the Taskbar, the color of selected system menus and a few more things here and there.

1. Click the “Colors” button.

2. Choose a color from the palette or click “Custom color” to select a different color.

3. You can also tick “Automatically pick an accent color from my background,” which will analyze your current background image and change the theme color based on that. If you have a slideshow selected, it will not automatically update the color each time the background changes.

4. Below the color selection, you have the option to turn on some extra effects.

• Transparency effects: toggles system-wide transparency options
• Show accent color: enables the color you just selected on a variety of additional UI elements
• Default app mode: uses either a white or black background for system apps like Settings.

Change Cursor

1. Click the “Mouse cursor” button.

2. Click the drop-down menu under “Scheme” to select a themed set of system cursors.

3. If you’ve downloaded or created a set of .ani files to use as cursor replacements, you can click “Browse…” to open a folder with cursor replacements.

4. If you mess things up, return to the default with the “Use Default” button.

5. Click “OK” when you’re done.

Change System Sounds

1. Click the “Sounds” button.

2. Under “Sound Scheme” you can select a themed set of sounds to use for your system.

3. You can also modify or disable individual types of audio events. Click on an event under “Program Events” to select it.

4. Once you’ve selected an event, you can use the drop-down under “Sounds” to change the sound for that event. Select “(None)” if you want to disable sound for that event type.

5. To hear what a file sounds like, select it from the drop-down and click the “Test” button.

6. If you have custom .wav files you want to use as system sounds, click the “Browse” button to load them.

7. Click “OK” when you’re done.

Conclusion: Saving Your Theme

Each part of your theme will apply automatically as you make changes. To save the entire theme as a package, click the “Save Theme” button under the main Theme menu.

Give your Theme a name, then click “Save.”

Now that you have created your own custom theme, you can export it and use it on any of your Windows 10 machines.

Alexander Fox is a tech and science writer based in Philadelphia, PA with one cat, three Macs and more USB cables than he could ever use.