Disable Delphi Rio IDE Theme

If you are not big fan of new Delphi IDE (light or dark ones) themes you are out of luck. They are default look and old Windows styled IDE is no longer officially supported.



In previous versions there was checkbox for enabling or disabling IDE themes. In Rio that checkbox is gone and you can only choose between default Light or Dark themes or use custom VCL Style.

But all is not lost. 

You can still disable themes by editing appropriate registry values.

Head to following registry key

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\20.0\Theme

and change following key-value entry:

Key: Enabled
Value: 0

If you wish to enable themes again just change Value back to 1.

Comments

  1. Unfortunately disabling this has side effects. Some dialogs only look correctly if theming is enabled. (Also unfortunately I don't remember which dialogs these were. I'm getting old...)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Disabling themes is no longer officially supported... so doing that introduces some visual issues and other bugs in some dialogs.

    However, that is the small price to pay for having back some lost functionality (like editor tabs icons, Code, Design, History and other tabs central alignment) and much snappier IDE.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh, I'm going to test it later today! Thanks for that.
    I'm spending much more time writing code on Delphi 10.2 because of the IDE theme which is terrible in certain screen resolutions/font sizes

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great tip! Thank you very much. In Rad Studio 10.3.2 the Theme Manager doesn't include the option to use custom vcl styles so your tip is actually a great way to bypass that and use any vcl style as your IDE theme.

    Navigate to this branch in the registry and set the keys as follows:

    Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\20.0\Theme

    Key: Theme
    Value: Custom

    Key: VCLStyle
    Value: Carbon


    Start your IDE and there you go!

    Try looking in your BDS installation folder for more vcl styles. Just use the filename part as the Value for the key: VCLStyle.

    Thanks again!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you for this. I'm running on an older computer, Windows 7, Delphi 6, all of which I'm very happy with, but I wanted to try the Delphi Community Edition and was totally bewildered by the display.

    Borland wouldn't have done this. Embarcadero seems to have the Microsoft approach - we're using the latest PCs and if you're not that's your problem!

    ReplyDelete

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