Hello to everybody and especially to Jorge Coelho,

I have been using the winstep dock since I was more or less forced to switch to win11 in January. I used win10, which was great, but new laptops was the spark for a new more modern experience. But win11 was bugged, less efficient and boring for a 2026 OS.

In the end...it was an opportunity to discover Winstep (say thx to win11 in the end ) and now I was happy to pay for the Nexus version to get both the dock and the shelves to keep my desktop clean and organised.

Using it everyday for 6 months, I have though observed two annoying behaviours that I wanted to report for a future improvement. (it will be a little long, forgive me in advance)

1)If you set the shelves to a transparent colour and use the "grid menu", folders/files tend to overlap each other, so that everything becomes an unreadable mess. See the pictures.



I have two possible solutions in mind (by order of preference):
-An option to force an opaque grid menu or separate the transparency possibility between the shelf and the related grid menu.
-An option to offset the grid menu opening outside of the shelf area.

2)I am using three monitors: 2x24"and my laptop daily via a usb TB5 dock. They have different resolutions.
In this config, one 24 in the primary display inside windows.
I have a dock on the primary display which I duplicate on the other displays.
Same for one shelf that I duplicate. So basically, the layout is the same on each monitor. 3 docks and 3 shelves in total.
so far..this config is saved in winstep and works.

But if I undock my laptop...the primary display switch to the built-in screen. And here we have several cases I have observed: usually, everything works and I get one dock and one shelf only. But the shelf lost the size and position I defined in the 3 monitors setup because it keeps the resolution and position from the 24"primary display.
Sometimes, for unknown reason, I could get 3 docks and 3 shelves..all in overlap. It happes usually if I restart the laptop while not being docked.



In the first case, if I revert back to the 3-monitors setup...it is ok and it reverts to the initial setup. But if I change the size and position on the buil-in only setup..then the initial setup is fucked up and I have to change it again.

All in all, multi-monitors works but only if the setup does not change the order of monitors.

As a solution, I think the setup/profile for each monitor should be linked to the monitor ID and nothing else. So if the monitor is enabled..you get on the monitor what you setup in the profile of this specific monitor. And if disabled, it should be disabled.
So instead of 1 profile for all the monitors in one setup => 1 profile for each monitor ID

I hope I was clear. In any case, let's discuss this.

Daniel Vitanza

Hi Daniel,

Just a quick reply for now regarding point 2 about the multi-monitor profiles, I will provide a more detailed answer later:

My guess is that you are still running v26.6, right?

A lot of work was invested in fixing and hardening the multi-monitor profiles and appbar (reserve screen space) code in the upcoming v26.8 (which was not easy because changes happen in real time and there are a ton of racing conditions). At this point multi-monitor handling seems to be rock solid, so please download the beta of v26.8 from

viewtopic.php?p=51217#p51217

and please let me know if that has fixed the issues with the multiple monitors.

Waouw That was a very quick answer !

I have installed the beta and I will test it. I'll keep you informed.
Thx already for the support

I confirm, the second issue for the multi-monitors is solved !

This was the most annoying one for day-to-day. Thx

For info, I have tried:

-2 monitors
-3 monitors
-1 monitor

and switching from one setup to another one and vice-versa. Always correct until now.

Yay! Thanks for the feedback.

Getting this right has been very difficult. Even when waking from sleep, Windows does not turn on all monitors at once - they wake up one by one, and each event causes a ton of Display Configuration Changed messages to be broadcast. So you can still be in the middle of processing one when another one arrives, for instance...

As if that wasn't complicated enough, the actions the software takes to adjust to the new configuration may themselves generate additional Windows configuration-change messages, which the software must then react to, and so on...

To make matters worse, if you are running Xtreme, NextSTART is also doing the same thing, and Xtreme must make sure that the NextSTART taskbar is ALWAYS below (or closer to the screen edge than) any shelf, even though both are reserving screen space which Windows assigns on a "first come, first served" basis.



Apologies, I meant to reply to this one in more detail and ended up forgetting all about it.

From Windows Vista up until Windows 10, it was possible to blur the background of irregularly shaped regions via an API call.

The Winstep software scanned the background bitmap of a dock or shelf for semi-transparent regions matching certain criteria, created a "map" of those regions in memory, and passed that map to the Windows DWM. From then on, the DWM automatically blurred only those regions against the window's background while the rest of the window remained normal.

This was perfect, because blurring the background solved precisely the type of readability issues you are describing here.

Windows 10 removed that capability, and Windows 11 never brought it back. The Windows backdrop system now only supports full-window blurring, not individual or irregular regions within a window.

Grid Stacks in docks or regular Shelf tabs are "permanent" and therefore have their own persistent individual settings, including transparency. They normally use the global Shelf theme, although each of these Grid Stacks can also be customized to use their own individual theme.

However, Grid Stacks created "on-the-fly" from folder shortcuts (i.e. folders set to open as Grid Stacks) do not have persistent settings because they are temporary and only exist while that Grid Stack is open. In that case, they inherit their settings from the parent Shelf, including the transparency level.

These two facts together create the problem you are describing.

A setting to open the Grid Stack outside the parent Shelf would not really solve it either, because the parent Shelf itself can be expanded to cover the entire screen.

The best solution would therefore be your first suggestion: adding a setting to make ALL temporary Grid Stacks fully opaque.

There is another potential solution, although I am not sure yet how feasible it would be, or even whether it would be worth implementing: creating a set of settings that applies to ALL temporary Grid Stacks - much like the current Grid Stack Properties panel, but without the Content tab and with the settings shared by every temporary Grid Stack.

Then, in the Tab Properties dialog, right next to "Open folders as Grid Stacks", there could be a choice between:

Inherit parent Shelf settings
or
Use shared Temporary Grid Stack settings

If the latter is selected, a button would provide access to the Temporary Grid Stack Properties dialog.

Reading..yes I understand how the multi-monitors management was a challenge. I could imagine just by seeing all the monitors flashing one after the other as you described when I connect the laptop. And indeed, each tiny modification, even chaning the taskbar position force a full refresh on a lot of things. Thx Windows ;p

Coming back to the transparency issue, it seems it will be indeed another challenge.
I thought to another solution as I have tinker a bit with the winstep themes to make something that suits my taste a bit more. Maybe, it is possible to create a file for the temporar grid stack menu only. But I think it is related to what you said about creating a full featured and indepedent temporar grid stack.

Yes. When that possibility occurred to me, I realized how much more useful it would be than a simple "make temporary Grid Stacks opaque" setting and, after making sure it was actually feasible, I immediately started working on it (and it's already working here).

Instead of fixing only the transparency issue, this gives temporary Grid Stacks access to essentially the same Appearance, Effects and Theme settings as regular Grid Stacks, but through a single shared profile used by all temporary Grid Stacks.

The choice is made on a per-Shelf basis, so each Shelf can either continue behaving exactly as it does now and have its temporary Grid Stacks inherit the parent Shelf settings, or use the shared Temporary Grid Stack settings instead.

This means, for example, that you could make temporary Grid Stacks fully opaque while keeping the parent Shelf transparent, but you could also give them a completely different theme, icon size, spacing, effects, etc. And because the profile is shared, you only have to configure it once rather than configuring every folder shortcut individually.

So it ends up solving your particular transparency problem while also providing a much more flexible and generally useful feature.

Initially I even considered making "Use shared Temporary Grid Stack settings" a per-tab setting rather than per-Shelf, but this would unnecessarily over-complicate things for no good reason.

What actually is making this a PITA to implement, believe it or not, is not the functionality itself but where the settings for this go in the existing Preferences and Properties dialogs.

New beta out, you can now test the new shared settings for temporary Grid Stacks feature (setting appears in the Contents tab of each Shelf Properties dialog):

viewtopic.php?p=51394#p51394

NICE it was faster than I expected.

I will install the update and test it this week. I keep you informed about the results.

So I've tested the new sub grid implementation and here are some feedbacks:

-It works globally. Nice ! Thx

-The option name "Use shared settings for temporaru Grid Stacks" seems a bit counter-intuitive. At first, I thought ticking the case would enable a global setting for temporary and normal grid stack. While it is the contrary. I would use something like "Use specific settings for temporary Grid Stacks" maybe.

-Ticking the option reset all the font settings I had for the normal Grid Stack. Just a bit annoying.

-There is something strange when opening a temporar grid stack. A bigger title appears first in the tab before showing the final UI I defined via all the options. I've uploaded a video via my onedrive because it is very difficult to describe or to printscreen at the right moment.

https://1drv.ms/v/c/dc082380915da8b1/IQCbXnuu7_O3RbSR0R4ul0HaAbV1V7PuZ-mlyUDQ7V-4f40?e=0PnQcl


I will continue to do some tests here and there.

Something very insightful I've just noticed !

I have my three shelves. Theyre are duplicated ones.

Changing the shelf scale in the main options in one shelf doesn't change the same option in another shelf. This is normal and expected.

But changing the shelf scale of the temporar grid in one shelf does change this option in all the other shelves.
As a matter of fact, on my fhd screen, the shelf in giant because I set 150% on the 4k screen.

Yes, I see what you mean, a user can indeed read "shared" as meaning shared between normal and temporary Grid Stacks and that's almost the exact opposite of what the option does.

"Use dedicated settings for temporary Grid Stacks" is more explicit, but then users might assume each temporary grid stack has its own dedicated settings which is not what happens.

Perhaps "Use dedicated shared settings for temporary Grid Stacks"...

OR we invert the whole thing and use "Temporary folder Grid Stacks inherit parent settings" where the meaning of unchecking that option is at least clear... it does not, however, explain what unchecking that does.

What do you suggest?



See, I think this is exactly the issue and the source of some confusion, in part precisely because of how powerful and flexible the application is.

All "normal" Grid Stacks - the ones you explicitly add via Insert New Item -> Grid Stack - are persistent objects and therefore have their own individual settings and properties. These can be accessed by right-clicking the Grid Stack icon in the parent object and selecting Grid Stack Properties.

Normally they all use the same global theme, but each Grid Stack can also have its own individual theme, just as Shelves normally all use the global theme but can each be configured to use a different one through the Themes tab of that object's own Properties dialog

The global theme is the theme you apply from the Themes tab in Preferences. When you change the theme there, it is applied to all objects that are not configured to lock their own theme, including objects that were previously using a different individual theme. If you do not want the global theme to override the theme of a particular object, you enable Lock Theme for that object.

Temporary folder Grid Stacks, on the other hand, do not exist as persistent objects, so they cannot have individual settings of their own. Until now they simply inherited their settings from the parent object, which can be a Shelf, a Drawer or even another Grid Stack.

That is what caused the problem you originally reported: if the parent Shelf was semi-transparent, the temporary Grid Stack inherited that transparency too.

When you enable Use shared settings for temporary Grid Stacks, you are not giving each temporary Grid Stack its own settings. Instead, you are creating a single settings profile shared by all temporary Grid Stacks.

This gives you much more control over how temporary Grid Stacks look, but the consequence is that they will all use those same shared settings regardless of the settings of the parent object that opened them.

By default, that shared profile also uses the global theme - including that theme's fonts. If you want temporary Grid Stacks to use a different theme and therefore different font settings, you can select one from the Themes tab of the shared Temporary Grid Stack Properties panel.

Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by "normal Grid Stack", the font settings you had customized there were actually the font settings of the parent Shelf, which the temporary Grid Stack was inheriting. Enabling the shared Temporary Grid Stack settings simply stops the temporary Grid Stack from inheriting those parent settings and makes it use the shared profile instead.



Indeed. Thanks for the video, if an image is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a thousand images.

Can you please make a backup of your settings (Preferences -> Backup) and send it over to the Winstep support address... see if I can reproduce it here.



Please try to use the exact Winstep terminology when describing these issues, especially when distinguishing between Shelves and Grid Stacks. Above I assume that when you say the ‘Shelf’ becomes giant you actually mean the temporary Grid Stack, since the setting you changed is ‘Grid Stack Scaling’. If that assumption is wrong, then I would be investigating a completely different problem.

Anyway, yes, that exposes a weakness in the idea of blindly sharing all the Grid Stack settings.

The behavior itself is currently logical: the Temporary Grid Stack profile is global, so changing the scale of temporary grid stacks in the shared profile to 150% changes it for every temporary Grid Stack, regardless of which Shelf launches it. That is exactly what "shared settings" means.

But scaling is not really a good candidate for a globally shared setting when different Shelves can live on monitors with very different resolutions or DPI settings. I will therefore probably change the code so that temporary Grid Stacks always inherit their scaling from the parent Shelf/Grid Stack, even when they otherwise use the shared Temporary Grid Stack profile.

And this is what I just did. The Grid Stack Scaling setting is no longer visible in the Appearance tab of the Shared Properties dialog for temporary Grid Stacks, and this property is now inherited from the parent object.

I also removed the "Customize Tray Icons" button to make room for some info text in the Contents tab (finding space in settings is always a PITA, but this button already exists in the Tray tab in Preferences so no biggie) and changed the setting to "Temporary folder Grid Stacks inherit parent settings".

I hope this, together with the info text and the new button caption, is enough for the setting to become self-explanatory.

And in the end settled for this: