Skip to content
Cong Liu edited this page Mar 30, 2016 · 8 revisions

NOTE: some content in this wiki applies only to 0.12 and earlier versions. For official documentation on 0.13 and later, see http://docs.nwjs.io

Frameless window requires node-webkit >= v0.3.0

A frameless window is a window without standard frames and window buttons, usually you would use a frameless window to custom titlebar and other standard window buttons. To have a quick glance of it, you can visit the frameless-window and webgl demo in zcbenz/nw-sample-apps.

Enable frameless window

To make your window frameless, you just need to add "frame": false in your app's package.json's window field, toolbar need to be disabled as well:

{
  "window": {
    "frame": false,
    "toolbar": false
  }
}

then your main window will be frameless. To open additional frameless windows from within your app you must also pass them the frameless options.

gui = require('nw.gui');
gui.Window.open('http://google.com',{toolbar:false,frame:false});

Make your window draggable

By default, the frameless window is non-draggable. The app needs to use -webkit-app-region: drag to specify the draggable region and use -webkit-app-region: no-drag to exclude the non-draggable area from the draggable region. Note that only rectangular shape is currently supported.

To make the whole window draggable, you can add -webkit-app-region: drag as body's style:

<body style="-webkit-app-region: drag">
</body>

And note that if you have made the whole window draggable, you must also mark buttons and custom window buttons as non-draggable, otherwise it would be very hard for users to click on them:

button {
  -webkit-app-region: no-drag;
}

If you're only using a custom titlebar, you also need to make buttons in titlebar non-draggable.

Mouse Events

Elements configured as drag regions will not emit mouse events such as mouseenter or mousemove. This prevents the :hover metaclass from activating. An effective workaround is to use a "screen" Element to capture the initial events and bubble them up where they belong. In this example, the screen only remains long enough to send mouseenter (and one mousemove event) which is enough to activate the correct :hover behavior.

There is currently no workaround for full mousemove support in a drag region.

<html>
  <body>
    <div id="Controls">
      <div class="screen"></div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>
#Controls {
  -webkit-app-region: drag;
  position: fixed;
  top: 0;
  right: 0;
  left: 0;
}

.screen {
  -webkit-app-region: no-drag;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  left: 0;
}

#Controls:hover .screen {
  display: none;
}

Text selection

One thing on frameless window is that the dragging behaviour may conflict with selecting text, for example, when you drag the titlebar, you may accidentally select the text on titlebar. To prevent this, you need to disable text selection on dragging area like this:

.titlebar {
  -webkit-user-select: none;
  -webkit-app-region: drag;
}

And also remember not to mark text area as draggable.

Context menu

On some platforms, the OS will treat non-draggable area as non-client frame, and when you right click on it a system window menu will popup. So you should not abuse non-draggable area and only use it for custom frame and titlebars, and you should never try to listen to contextmenu event on non-draggable areas.

Window operations

After the standard frame is removed, you need to provide ways for users to close/minimize the window. The pure javascript way to close a window is window.close(), if you want more, you can use node-webkit's native Window API.

Clone this wiki locally