Windows maintains 19 system colors for painting various parts of the display. You can obtain and set these colors using GetSysColor and SetSysColor. Identifiers defined in WINDOWS.H specify the system color. Setting a system color with SetSysColor changes it only for the current Windows session.
You can set system colors for future Windows sessions using the Windows Control Panel program. You can also modify the [colors] section in the WIN.INI file. The [colors] section uses keywords for the 19 system colors (different from the GetSysColor and SetSysColor identifiers) followed by red, green, and blue values that can range from 0 to 255. The following table shows how the 19 system colors are identified using the WINDOWS.H identifiers for GetSysColor and SetSysColor, the WIN.INI keywords, and the Control Panel terms:
| GetSysColor & SetSysColor | WIN.INI | Control Panel |
| COLOR_SCROLLBAR | Scrollbar | Scroll Bars |
| COLOR_BACKGROUND | Background | Desktop Background |
| COLOR_ACTIVECAPTION | ActiveTitle | Active Title Bar |
| COLOR_INACTIVECAPTION | InactiveTitle | Inactive Title Bar |
| COLOR_MENU | Menu | Menu Bar |
| COLOR_WINDOW | Window | Window Background |
| COLOR_WINDOWFRAME | WindowFrame | Window Frame |
| COLOR_MENUTEXT | MenuText | Menu Text |
| COLOR_WINDOWTEXT | WindowText | Window Text |
| COLOR_CAPTIONTEXT | TitleText | Title Bar Text |
| COLOR_ACTIVEBORDER | ActiveBorder | Active Border |
| COLOR_INACTIVEBORDER | InactiveBorder | Inactive Border |
| COLOR_APPWORKSPACE | AppWorkspace | Application Workspace |
| COLOR_HIGHLIGHT | Highlight | |
| COLOR_HIGHLIGHTTEXT | HighlightText | |
| COLOR_BTNFACE | ButtonFace | |
| COLOR_BTNSHADOW | ButtonShadow | |
| COLOR_GRAYTEXT | GrayText | |
| COLOR_BTNTEXT | ButtonText |
Most of these are self-explanatory. COLOR_BACKGROUND is the color of the desktop area behind all the windows. The COLOR_WINDOWFRAME color is the color used for lines drawn between many of the sections of the display, such as between a menu and a client area. The last six system colors cannot be changed from the Control Panel: The two ”Highlight“ colors involve selected options in menus and list boxes. The last four system colors determine the colors used in push buttons.
Default values for these 19 colors are provided by the display driver. Windows uses these default values unless they are overriden by the [colors] section of WIN.INI.