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Posts Tagged ‘win api’

Renaming Window Title’s

December 29th, 2008 6 comments

So, a few days ago, a friend of mine complained about not being able to rename the title captions of his windows. You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Well, the main reason is for code development. At the company I used to work at, we used an IDE called IAR. While for the most part, it is decent, when a person loads more than one workspace when debugging multiple chips, the IAR windows are all named the same thing, and so it gradually becomes more frustrating as more and more IAR instances are started.

My friend wanted a quick and dirty way to rename windows. I googled for an app, but there didn’t seem to be any “free” utilities that did this. Being the ex-windows API geek I am (from messing with vb5/6 in the old-days), I decided I’d give it a with. Fortunately, I found a great codeproject project to start as a base. Turns out the project has been done quite well (at least to my liking). I believe credit should be given where it’s due, and so I will simply highlight the minor changes I made to modify the project to make it change window titles in addition to hiding/showing windows.

To make the little app more useable, I’ve added a hotkey for editing the title of the current window (Alt+F2). It should be configurable from the menu. My friend has tried it and it seems to work. For the time being, I’ll upload the binary and source. There aren’t really any real comments as it’s pretty much the code project source with about a page’s worth of code modifications and additions.

Modifications:

In summary, I simply added in the SetWindowText api function and added an extra hot-key. I also modified the interface code to allow people to rename windows; however it seemed cumbersome so I added a hot-key feature, which seems to work for most of my friend. I guess I’m getting a little lazy, especially since most of the code is not mine, so I probably won’t even bother to paste the bits of code I did write. I believe it’s pretty clear, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Download: Windows_Hider_Renamer.zip