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How can I setup a ListView in a WinForm so that when an item is selected it is not highlighted? i.e. no blue background.

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How is the user supposed to tell that she successfully selected an item? Or that the ListView has the focus? You can do it with OwnerDraw = true but that's pretty painful for ListView. Best avoided. –  Hans Passant Aug 5 '11 at 11:46

3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

ObjectListView -- an open source wrapper around a .NET ListView -- allows you to choose which colors you want the selected items to have. So you can set the highlighting background color to be the same as the ListView, and just change the foreground color. As David H pointed out, you will have to do something different with the selected rows!

In the following shot, the selected row has a darker background and lighter text color:

enter image description here

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Are you looking for HideSelection?

If you want the selected item not to be highlighted even when the list view has the focus, then that's going to be pretty confusing for the users and would require some custom painting.

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Better ListView allows you to display each item in custom state (compliant to current Windows Theme) or with completely custom look - this goes beyond HideSelection property, which is available as well:

enter image description here

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There is also free Better ListView Express with less features.

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