« Undocumented mouse pointer functions
Undocumented scatter plot behavior »

uicontrol side-effect: removing figure toolbar

Earlier versions of Matlab had an undocumented side-effect in the uicontrol function, of removing the figure toolbar if the figure’s toolbar property was set to ‘auto’ (which is the default value for figures).

In order to restore the toolbar, or prevent its removal in the first place, set your figure’s toolbar property to ‘figure’. This should preferably be done immediately after creating the figure, or in its *_OpeningFcn() function if the figure was created using GUIDE:

set(hFig,'toolbar','figure');

The uicontrol issue is now documented in the latest Matlab 7.9 release (R2009b), although it was undocumented for many earlier Matlab releases. Nevertheless, the current documentation, coupled with the fact that this issue was widely reported in the CSSM newsgroup and so is not really innovative, made me hesitate before posting. But I’m currently on vacation and don’t have time for a more detailed article this week (I skipped last week entirely), so I apologize to anyone who feels disappointed. I promise to compensate when I get back from vacation…

A similar issue was reported for GUIDE-created figures, and was reportedly solved in Matlab 7.2 (R2006a).

Bookmark and Share

Related posts:

  1. Figure toolbar customizations Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to customize the Matlab figure toolbar....
  2. Figure toolbar components Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to access existing toolbar icons and how to add non-button toolbar components....
  3. Spicing up Matlab uicontrol tooltips Matlab uicontrol tooltips can be spiced-up using HTML and CSS, including fonts, colors, tables and images...
  4. Uicontrol callbacks This post details undocumented callbacks exposed by the underlying Java object of Matlab uicontrols, that can be used to modify the control's behavior in a multitude of different events...
  5. Additional uicontrol tooltip hacks Matlab's uicontrol tooltips have several limitations that can be overcome using the control's underlying Java object....
  6. Setting line position in an edit-box uicontrol Matlab uicontrols have many useful features that are only available via Java. Here's how to access them....

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Figure window, GUI, Low risk of breaking in future versions, Stock Matlab function, UI controls, Undocumented feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

PoorSo-soHelpfulVery helpfulExcellent! (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...
 Bookmark and Share Print Print

Leave a Reply


Wrap code fragments inside <pre lang="matlab"> tags, like this: 

   <pre lang="matlab">
   a = magic(3);
   sum(a)
   </pre>