Change color of scrollbar in windows 10

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to change the color of the scrollbar in windows 10.

At the moment the color difference between the slider and the background is small enough for me to have to search for it, especially when it is small.

Can this be done natively with windows 10 or if not is there any 3rd party software that I can use to achieve this?

PS, I found this post: How to change the scrollbar color in Windows XP? it seems to be very outdated and the solution looks to be only for winXP, but correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: Comments showed that there is no officially supported way by Microsoft. This question is now focused on either MS changing their policy or any unofficial way of solving this problem.

EDIT2: I do know that there is a high contrast mode for windows, but the only thing that I have contrast issues with is scroll bars, as their gray values are very close to each other. It would be totally overkill to use high contrast mode for a small thing like this.

Solution 1

In Windows 7, it was easily possible to customise appearance of every individual screen item (including colours of scrollbars) as explained here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/guides/change_colours/computer/win/win7/index.shtml

In Windows 10, the advanced customization options were removed from the Personalization settings page for some reason.

However, it is still possible to adjust the scrollbar colour in Windows 10, but you have to do the change via Registry:

1. Open the Registry Editor.

2. Find the following registry keys:

   Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors

   Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Colors

3. There you have to change the Scrollbar value to any colour you like.

   The defaults are: "200 200 200" and "212 208 200", respectively.

   You can substitute them with any colour combination "RRR GGG BBB", where RRR/GGG/BBB are all within range 0-255 and represent the red/green/blue colour components, respectively.

4. Exit the Registry Editor. You will need to log-off and log-in again for the change to take effect.

Solution 2

"is there any 3rd party software that I can use"

Yes.

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds

Comments

[coolcat007]

You cant select a color for the scroll bar there

[Albin]

some description about the software will be helpful

[coolcat007]

Thanks for your answer. I'll check if this indeed works once I'm able to. If it does, I'll set this as the answer. Also, I recently heard that Windows is planning to add more customizability back to the OS theme. I don't know the details, but maybe that could also include scrollbar styling.

[coolcat007]

I tried this, but I'm afraid that it doesnt seem to work for me. I also would have expected to be able to specify multiple colors: the scroll bar, the scroll bar slider, the scroll bar slider when hovered and the scroll bar slider when clicked/dragged (and potentially the color of the arrows at the top and bottom)

[rakslice]

I just installed a trial of WindowBlinds 10.8.2 to check this out. It allows you to easily switch to a theme where the scrollbar has more traditional well-defined borders and better contrast which can then be edited further, although it doesn't let you edit the color of the scrollbar in the existing Windows 10 theme as far as I can tell.

[Damn Vegetables]

What's the difference the two keys? Why are there two?

[Behrouz.M]

I tried the trick for Win 10 but did not work even after restarting my computer.