Transparent Windows Sidebar

(This is one of an irregular series of posts entitled “Stupid Geek Tricks”. The complete collection of Stupid Geek Tricks posts is available on a single page, or via a special RSS feed.)

Yes, I know…I keep intending to write a series of “stupid geek tricks” articles, and I still haven’t gotten around to it.

This post, unfortunately, isn’t going to represent the start of clearing that particular writing backlog. However, since I just resolved one of the things that has annoyed me about Vista, I thought I’d share.

I am a fan of Vista’s Glass interface. I know, I’m weak-minded when it comes to pretty things, and Glass is really a rip off of various pretty UI’s for OSX and/or Linux…but that doesn’t lessen my appreciation for Glass.

One of gripes I’ve had with Glass, however, is Microsoft’s decision to not have the sidebar be transparent/translucent when an application window is maximized. Maximize a window, and the sidebar background goes to black.

I’m aware that there are a couple of hack-y remedies for this situation, but I had a past install of XP ruined by a misbehaving skinning program, and so I’ve been leery of going down that path.

Enter NirCmd.

NirCmd is a handy little command-line sonic screwdriver-type utility I stumbled across recently, which has all sorts of odd little functionality. For example, it can be called in a batch script to automagically mute/unmute/set the Windows system volume when booting, waking up, etc. (NirCmd is, by the way, the first utility I’ve been able to find that allows for a batch file to affect the Vista system-wide volume.)

It also has the ability to render windows transparent.

Just for yucks a little while ago, I typed into a DOS box:

nircmd win trans ititle “windows sidebar” 1

…and here’s what I saw on my screen:

That’s a maximized Firefox window open, sitting next to a Windows Sidebar through which you can see my desktop wallpaper peeking through.

It may not seem like much…but it finally resolves something that’s been annoying me for months, and I am pleased.