Ribbon Skinning Guide

**Splitwirez** · January 24th, 2017 09:19 PM

Ever get sick of the default ribbon? Ever want your crazy awesome Visual Style to look consistent but you don't want to have to ditch the ribbon with OldNewExplorer? Well fear not, for at long last, there IS a solution!

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HOW TO RIBBONS:

1. In WSB, go to Fonts, Colours, & System Metrics > Fonts & System Metrics, and change the BTNFACE and BTNTEXT properties to either #000000 and #FFFFFF or #FFFFFF and #000000. They cannot be the same, they must be at opposite ends of the colour spectrum!

2. Go to C:\Windows\system32 and copy UIRibbonRes.dll to somewhere, and extract all the BITMAPs from the copied UIRibbonRes.dll . I recommend 7zip for this, as unlike Resource Hacker, 7zip preserves the resource numbers. This is very useful, especially for cases like this.

3. Modify the BITMAPs as you wish, but DO NOT RESIZE THEM, and make sure you save them as 24-BIT BITMAPS. 8-BIT AND 32-BIT WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY, THUS TURNING YOUR ENTIRE RIBBON INTO A COMPLETE FUSTERCLUCK. DON'T DO IT. SERIOUSLY.

4. Replace the modified bitmaps in the copied UIRibbonRes.dll as desired.

5. Take ownership of the original UIRibbonRes.dll , then rename it and add your new one in its place.

6. Restart Explorer

7. ???

8. Watch as things don't work quite as you intended.

8.1. Repeat steps 1 through 8 until step 8 does not occur and is instead replaced by step 10.

10. PROFIT!!! ^-^

11. Repeat steps 2 - 10 for C:\Windows\sysWOW64\UIRibbonRes.dll if you want to support 32-bit applications (including Windows Style Builder) ._.

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HOW TO WHICH BITMAPS ARE WHAT (WIP):

To the best of my awareness, the order of the bitmaps, although to be honest I'm not 100% sure.

Windows 7:
NYI
MOAR COMING SOON

Windows 8.1:
1517 and 1519 are the ribbon tabs. 1517 can be transparent. Sadly, 1514 is only 1px wide, which severely limits what one can do with it.

1538 is small buttons, with or without text.

1542 - 1544 is those gallery box thingies.

1546, 1548 are the context menu hovers.

1577 is the File button.

1696 is the Quick Access bar's background when it is at the top.

1698 is the panel backgrounds.

1700 is the panel footers

1704 - 1710 are contextual tab headers.

MOAR COMING SOON

Windows 10:
NYI
MOAR COMING SOON

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Please note that a UIRibbonRes DLL from Windows 7 will work on Windows 8.1 SO LONG AS you also copy over the Windows 7 versions of UIRibbon.dll and [LANGUAGEFOLDER]\UIRibbon.dll.mui . This also removes the "File" text on the button in the top left of the ribbon. However, this complicates installation for the end-user and requires you to distribute MUI files for all languages, so keep that in mind. Windows 10 is...not as co-operative, sadly, so there's no way to remove the "File" text on there :/

Also, if you find out what a bitmap does, or any other useful information, please post that below, and I'll try to stay on top of adding that to this post! (Seriously...it'd really help.)

Oh and if you need help, ask. Seriously, do it.

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CREDITS:
Urko, for discovering the means of doing this back in 2013.
devillnside, for pushing me to actually get a tutorial written.

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(Mods, feel free to move this thread, I wasn't really sure where to post it .-. )

**devillnside** · January 25th, 2017 04:39 AM

nicely done mate..although umm... i didnt get the part about "uiribbonres.dll from windows 7"... didnt know they even existed on win 7!!!??!!

**innuendo** · January 25th, 2017 07:13 AM

nice thread Splitwirez , already saw original post from Urko on WSB forums and useful for sure.
GSW953 already made it under his last VS the blue theme with such mod keeping ribbon.

I just wanted to add my two cents for that ribbon .
If you want to get rid of the help button on the right, use customizerGod which works very well in its current version with any icon of your choice
https://www.door2windows.com/customizergod/
There is a "file ribbon "section where you can easily replace the default icon

I 've made few weeks ago a tutorial on my YT channel to show that .

Regards

**Splitwirez** · January 25th, 2017 10:12 AM

Originally Posted by devillnside

nicely done mate..although umm... i didnt get the part about "uiribbonres.dll from windows 7"... didnt know they even existed on win 7!!!??!!

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type "mspaint"
3. Press enter
4. ???
5. RIBBON!!!
(Yes it's in other applications...e.g. WordPad, Windows Live Essentials 2012, WINDOWS STYLE BUILDER BETAS...)

Originally Posted by innuendo

nice thread Splitwirez , already saw original post from Urko on WSB forums and useful for sure.
GSW953 already made it under his last VS the blue theme with such mod keeping ribbon.

WHERE
(Seriously...just downloaded what I assume is that style to try out in a VM, and I see no UIRibbonRes dlls, so...I guess I grabbed the wrong one? Idk...can I get a link to the one you're talking about? .____. )

Originally Posted by innuendo

I just wanted to add my two cents for that ribbon .
If you want to get rid of the help button on the right, use customizerGod which works very well in its current version with any icon of your choice
https://www.door2windows.com/customizergod/
There is a "file ribbon "section where you can easily replace the default icon

I 've made few weeks ago a tutorial on my YT channel to show that.

Regards

Yeah, I think that thing is in UIRibbon.dll, but I'll add a note mentioning that you can also replace it with that. Thanks ^-^

**devillnside** · January 27th, 2017 12:17 AM

Originally Posted by Splitwirez

1. Press WIN+R
2. Type "mspaint"
3. Press enter
4. ???
5. RIBBON!!!
(Yes it's in other applications...e.g. WordPad, Windows Live Essentials 2012, WINDOWS STYLE BUILDER BETAS...)

WHERE
(Seriously...just downloaded what I assume is that style to try out in a VM, and I see no UIRibbonRes dlls, so...I guess I grabbed the wrong one? Idk...can I get a link to the one you're talking about? .____. )

Yeah, I think that thing is in UIRibbon.dll, but I'll add a note mentioning that you can also replace it with that. Thanks ^-^

hmm well that was dumb of me i guess LOL

**nnq2603** · March 16th, 2021 01:02 PM

Originally Posted by devillnside

"uiribbonres.dll from windows 7"...

Hello, @devillnside , can you give me some advice about how this dll doesn't work on my Win7 system? Since apparently you're still on Win7 on some of your system, you might be able to help with this problem... Anyway if you don't have time, that's ok.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/62ql7...onRes.zip/file

I just did a quick batch color-changing on Bitmap section of UIribbonRes.dll by Restorator and an images processing tool. Save back to *.dll and replace it all across the windows system. Had the BTNface, etc... set as #000000 and #FFFFFF as recomendation. The ribbon part in Mspaint or Workpad still looks like original, nothing ever changed.

What's frequently reason for this type of problem? Thanks