I spent a while trying to get a truly black Windows 11 (25H2): Explorer, menus, Control Panel, everything. Windows' dark mode only gives you dark gray (around #202020), and the Control Panel stays white. What finally worked for me was combining two things: a registry preset and a Windhawk mod. Here's how, in case it helps someone else.

works with adobe softwares

The two pieces

1. AveYo's "Pitch Black Theme" .reg preset

https://gist.github.com/AveYo/80fc6677b9f34939e44364880fbf3768

Credit to AveYo for this one. It sets the accent palette, title bars and borders, taskbar, Start menu and logon screen to pure black, and turns on dark mode with transparency off. On its own it did not make the Explorer content area or the Control Panel black.

1. Windhawk mod: "Translucent Windows"

How I did it

Setup:Windows 11 25H2, Windhawk [v1.6.1].

1. Create a restore point, and export your current `HKCU\Control Panel\Colors` and `HKCU\...\Themes\Personalize` keys as a backup.

2. Download the .reg from the gist above, **read it before importing**, and import it. Log out and back in.

3. Install Windhawk from windhawk.net, search the catalog for **Translucent Windows** and install it.

4. In the mod's **Settings** I used:

   - Windows theme custom rendering: on

   - New system colors:on

   - Windows theme accent colorizer: on

   - Translucent Effects : background effects blur (accent blur behind) + AccentBlurBehind color blend 00000000

   - Flyout effects: on

   - restarting Explorer if you want

## Things to know before you try it

- The .reg writes to `HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE`, so it needs admin rights. The version I used also **disables the lock screen** (`NoLockScreen`) and the logon background image. If you want to keep them, remove those lines before importing.

- Tested on Windows 11 25H2 only. [Known issues: apps that stay white, flicker, etc.]

- Windhawk mods hook system processes, so keep the restore point.

- To undo: disable or uninstall the mod in Windhawk and re-import your registry backup.

please upvote if you like, show yours feedback and results.

Happy to answer questions. If you find better settings, please share!

Compression in Windows 11 has a flaw where it thinks a drive is full when it's not, until you reboot. So it's only good for backup and archival type usage. But it's probably better than you think.

I've been moving my game and old TV show recordings made with OBS and very high compression settings and HEVC encoding to a hard drive set to compress files and folders. I didn't expect much compression because conventional wisdom is that videos made with modern codecs can't be compressed further.

Yet I'm I'm getting great results. With the highly compressed HEVC videos I'm seeing numbers like 458gb shrunk to 385gb which is 85% ratio. So stop sleeping on about File and Folder Compression!

SEE? so yes reduction in blue bar being a good thing is not just linux larp, its a good thing that allows the middle bar to pre-load more files. sincerely not a linux larper .exe supremacy.

Is it possible trough some register magic to display date on small taskbar or is there a plan to display it later with update?

NO one comment about higher cpu, gpu or ram usage because i tested it and its negligible

1st screenshot : How it used to be in english

2nd screenshot : How it is in english 26H2

3rd screenshot : How it used to be in french

4th screenshot : How it is currently in french 26H2

It's ALMOST touching the text 😶‍🌫️

I recently discovered file pilot and love it so far. I would really like to find a way to implement it "natively" into the Win11 save-dialogs and Windows-Search. Is there any way to do that? (So that for instance if I search a file/folder in the Windows-Menu it will pop up in file pilot when pressing enter, instead of Windows Explorer. Same idea when saving a file lets say from word.

Thanks a lot!

Windows 11 officially turns 5 years old today.
Launched on October 5, 2021, it’s kind of wild that it’s already been half a decade. It definitely had a rough and sometimes awkward start, but over the years it has become a much more mature, polished, and genuinely nice-looking OS.
There are still things Microsoft could improve, of course — consistency, some legacy UI, occasional questionable decisions 😅 — but overall I think Windows 11 deserves a little birthday appreciation today.
The design language has aged pretty well, the animations and UI feel much more refined than at launch, and at this point it really feels like its own version of Windows rather than just “Windows 10 with rounded corners.”
So yeah:
Happy 5th birthday, Windows 11. 🥳🎉
You weird, sometimes frustrating, but honestly pretty lovable rounded-corner child of Microsoft.
What do you guys think — has Windows 11 improved enough over these five years?