Just remember, love is live, and hate is living death!

From time to time, I encounter the same issue. I’ve got a TPageControl, a TTabSheet on it, and a simply TEdit that replaced a TLabel just for the purpose of the content to be copyable.

BorderStyle is set to bsNone, ReadOnly to True, ad it looks just like a label on modern Windows.

But as soon as you use this on a Windows that uses the classic style (the one that looks a bit like Windows 2000), the tabsheets do no longer have a white background, but a clBtnFace one, and since TEdit is not really tranparent, they look out of place suddenly.

I searched the Delphi-PRAXiS forum for solutions, and found a TTransEdit component there – but that one, I had already discarded years ago, and again didn’t solve the issue for me.

Annoyed by all these struggles, I went another route. I added UXTheme to the uses clause, and simply updated the color based on theming.

procedure TformNTProcess.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
   FProcessImageName := '';
   FTerminated := false;
   if not UseThemes then begin
   editImageName.Color := clBtnFace;
   editImageNameNT.Color := clBtnFace;
   end;
end;

So far, this works much better and reliable than replacing all TEdit with TTransEdit. Granted, it does not provide transparency for background images, but it solves the TTabSheet theming issue better than a nonperfect transparency solution.