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Reacting to Windows Settings Change in a Flutter Desktop App

Dynamically theme your Flutter Windows App using Event Channels to receive events

Giacomo Policicchio
Better Programming
5 min readMar 30, 2022

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Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Synopsis: Learn how to set a WNDPROC callback function from Flutter using Platform Channels in a Plugin. The example shows how to dynamically change the Theme in your App.

Introduction

Two months ago Flutter 2.10 brought stable Windows support. Ok, this wasn’t news, Flutter compiled applications for Windows before, why is it so important now? The answer is a simple word: “stable”, cause now Google declared it is, we can decide to invest more of our time and resources in developing Apps for Windows using this fantastic tool.

Thanks to the work of several enthusiastic people, a lot of packages on pub.dev support Windows development, and the list is growing. However, as told before, designing our shiny new Windows App in Flutter sometimes there could be something that we miss.

For example, we could need that our App should react to Windows system-wide events, and change its behavior accordingly. Flutter doesn’t have a ready-made interface for doing this. To learn how it can be made we will implement an Event Channel that can make these events available in our Dart code.

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Giacomo Policicchio
Giacomo Policicchio

Written by Giacomo Policicchio

Software developer, hungry reader, curious almost about everything from technologies, science, and more.

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