In this post, I am going to show you how to create a custom titlebar for your nw.js app. If you haven’t heard of nw.js, check it out here. It enables a new way of writing desktop applications with all web technologies. Let’s answer a simple question. Why do we need a custom titlebar ? Because it’s better than the default one and it looks the same across different platforms. Default titlebar looks different, on different operating systems.

Devlog with custom titlebar And with default one.

Custom titlebar looks cool right ?

Let’s get started.

The first thing we do is, we disable the default titlebar. "window": { "toolbar": false, "frame": false } To do that, make the frame and toolbar name false in package.json. This will remove the frame, and now the window becomes frameless. After the first step, we will notice that the window is frameless now and we will not be able to drag the application anymore. To make the whole window draggable, add style -webkit-app-region: drag to body tag. <body style="-webkit-app-region: drag"> ... </body> Or we can make a particular region draggable, by adding style -webkit-app-region: drag to that element. <div class="titlebar" style="-webkit-app-region: drag"> ... </div> Now, our application is draggable. Next thing, we add the window buttons (close, minimize and maximize) For buttons, I’ve used semantic-ui labels for devlog. OS X style buttons Though it’s not perfect, it does the job well.

That’s it, we have successfully created a custom titlebar for our nw.js application. Go ahead and create awesome titlebars for your apps.