What is windowless control?

Question

On Windows they are called "Windowless Control".

• Richedit

What is windowless control and what are its benefits?

Answer 1

Windowless control is an object that gives you control behavior without requiring a window to be created.

This is useful when you want to modify or extend the behavior, or when you want to use the behavior in places where creating a window would be inconvenient or difficult.

Say, for example, you want to paste hundreds of rich editing controls on a page, if they were in each window, then each of them must get focus in order to get user input, and each will draw individually, etc.

But if you want to track the location of windowless controls and do some other homework that you usually get for free by creating a window (i.e. routing keyboard messages), then you can get better results with lower overhead using controls without windows.

Answer 2

This may be helpful.

Answer 3

Windowless controls do not have a special window handle.

Answer 4

Anon's . This is a control that does not require a basic window handle ( HWND ). The need for them arose especially when using web browsers, since for each process there is a limit of 10,000 max. You would open as two tabs of semi-arid web pages and you would run out of pens.

Working with and, especially, dragging and dropping your own windowless controls is difficult because at least you need to recreate their original, sometimes very complex and complex implementation. (fe: IE listbox is still window driven due to all the tricks involved )

Answer 5

in my opinion, windowless management can use less sys resources and it simplifies setup