Question

I’m working on a project updating their WinForms application UI to be more consistent with sizes. TextBox and ComboBox controls have different heights by default, even with the same font. I’ve been able to resize the text boxes by turning off AutoSize, but the text still hugs the top of the control, leaving a gap below.

Is there any way to center the text vertically in the control?

Answer 1

If you’re turning off AutoSize on a control, it must be a Label, since TextBox doesn’t have an AutoSize property. The TextAlign property of a Label is of type ContentAligment, so you can set both horizontal and vertical alignment.

For various boring reasons, TextBoxes in Windows are intended to auto-adjust their heights to the font used. To control the height and vertically center the text, you can quickly create a custom UserControl, that you can use for replacing all your TextBoxes with.

On your UserControl, set the BorderStyle to Fixed3D and the BackColor to System.Window. Add a TextBox and set its BorderStyle to None. In the Resize event for the control, add code that makes the TextBox the same width as the user control’s client area (accounting for the border pixels) and left-aligns it (i.e. textBox1.Left = 0;) and vertically centers it (e.g. textBox1.Top = (this.Height - textBox1.Height) / 2;).

Finally, add to the user control any TextBox-type properties and events you need (probably just Text and TextChanged, I would guess), and wire them up so that they pass through to the TextBox inside your control, like this:

public string Text
{
    get => textBox1.Text;
    set => textBox1.Text = value;
}

If you wanted to get super-fancy with this, you could even replace your user control’s TextAlign property with one that is actually of type ContentAlignment (like the Label) and then align the inner TextBox to match.

This same approach works for a ComboBox, although it will look slightly odd. With the ComboBox, you set its FlatStyle property to Flat – otherwise you deal with it the same as a TextBox. It will look odd because the drop-down arrow box won’t be quite at the top and bottom of the panel.