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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:23:20+00:00

Is the documentation for Rich Edit Controls really as bad (wrong?) as it seems

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Is the documentation for Rich Edit Controls really as bad (wrong?) as it seems to be? Right now I’m manually calling LoadLibrary(‘riched20.dll’) in order to get a Rich Edit Control to show up. The documentation for Rich Edit poorly demonstrates this in the first code sample for using Rich Edit controls.

It talks about calling InitCommonControlsEx() to add visual styles, but makes no mention of which flags to pass in.

Is there a better way to load a Rich Edit control?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787877(VS.85).aspx

Here’s the only code I could write to make it work:

#include 'Richedit.h' #include 'commctrl.h'  INITCOMMONCONTROLSEX icex; icex.dwSize = sizeof(INITCOMMONCONTROLSEX); icex.dwICC = ICC_USEREX_CLASSES;  //Could be 0xFFFFFFFF and it still wouldn't work InitCommonControlsEx(&icex);  //Does nothing for Rich Edit controls  LoadLibrary('riched20.dll');  //Manually?  For real? hWndRichEdit = CreateWindowEx(     ES_SUNKEN,     RICHEDIT_CLASS,     '',     WS_BORDER | WS_VISIBLE | WS_CHILD,     2, 2, 100, 24,     hWnd, (HMENU) ID_RICH_EDIT, hInst, NULL);
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  1. Using MFC, RichEdit controls just work.

    Loading with InitCommonControlsEx() – ICC_USEREX_CLASSES doesn’t load RichEdit AFAIK, you don’t need it as it only does the ‘standard’ common controls, which don’t include richedit. Apparently you only need to call this to enable ‘visual styles’ in Windows, not to get RichEdits working.

    If you’re using 2008, you want to include Msftedit.dll and use the MSFTEDIT_CLASS instead (MS are rubbish for backward compatibilty sometimes).

    The docs do suggest you’re doing it right for Win32 programming.

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