Technical articles - Undocumented Matlab

Spicing up the Matlab Editor

Matlab’s Editor and Workspace can be enhanced quite significantly using an open-source utility.

March 30, 2018 2 Comments

Auto-scale image colors

Images can be automatically color-scaled for maximum resolution, using the undocumented MarkedClean event.

February 21, 2018 1 Comment

Adding custom properties to GUI objects

It is very easy to add custom user-defined properties and methods to GUI handles and Java references in Matlab.

February 15, 2018 6 Comments

IP address input control

A built-in JIDE control can be used in Matlab GUI for IP-address entry/display.

January 31, 2018 3 Comments

Customizing axes tick labels

Multiple customizations can be applied to tick labels.

January 24, 2018 5 Comments

Customizing histogram plots

Basic bar charts and histogram plots can be customized in important aspects.

January 17, 2018 2 Comments

Toolbar button labels

GUI toolbar button labels can easily be set and customized using underlying Java components.

January 8, 2018 No Comments

Using SQLite in Matlab

SQLite databases can be accessed in a variety of different ways in Matlab.

December 27, 2017 5 Comments

PlotEdit context-menu customization

A combination of Matlab and Java Robot commands to automate a certain animation can be used when we cannot access underlying GUI/graphics code.

December 13, 2017 No Comments

Builtin PopupPanel widget

We can use a built-in Matlab popup-panel widget control to display lightweight popups that are attached to a figure window.

December 6, 2017 1 Comment

As I have repeatedly posted in recent years, Matlab is advancing towards web-based GUI. The basic underlying technology is more-or-less stable: an HTML/Javascript webpage that is created-on-the-fly and rendered in a stripped-down browser window (based on Chromium-based jxBrowser in recent years). However, the exact mechanism by which the controls (“widgets”)

November 27, 2017 5 Comments

Customizing contour plots part 2

Matlab contour labels’ color and font can easily be customized.

November 12, 2017 11 Comments

The HotLinks feature

feature(‘HotLinks’) can be used to temporarily disable hyperlinks and other markups in the Matlab console.

October 24, 2017 1 Comment

Tips for accelerating Matlab performance

My article on “Tips for Accelerating MATLAB Performance” was recently featured in the September 2017 Matlab newsletter digest.

October 5, 2017 2 Comments

Faster csvwrite/dlmwrite

The speed of the builtin csvwrite, dlmwrite functions can be improved dramatically.

October 3, 2017 5 Comments

Runtime code instrumentation

Conditional breakpoints can be used to instrument code with user-specified code.

September 28, 2017 3 Comments

Advanced Matlab online webinars

Several live online webinars on advanced Matlab programming will be presented in September-October 2017.

September 7, 2017 2 Comments

Matlab GUI training seminars – Zurich, 29-30 August 2017

Advanced Matlab training courses on Matlab User Interfaces (GUI) will be presented in Zurich Switzerland on 29-30 August, 2017

August 4, 2017 No Comments

Sending HTML emails from Matlab

Matlab’s sendmail only sends simple text messages by default; a simple hack can cause it to send HTML-formatted messages.

August 3, 2017 2 Comments

User-defined tab completions – take 2

Matlab has changed the mechanism that enables user-defined tab-completion of function inputs.

July 12, 2017 11 Comments

Matlab Expo – Bern, 22 June 2017

I will be speaking about easy-to-use Matlab tricks at the upcoming Matlab Expo in Bern, Switzerland on June 22, 2017.

June 11, 2017 3 Comments

Matlab compilation quirks – take 2

A few hard-to-trace quirks with Matlab compiler outputs are explained.

May 31, 2017 No Comments

GUI formatting using HTML

HTML formatting an be used to align and background-color text within Matlab uicontrols such as buttons, listboxes, uitables etc.

April 5, 2017 6 Comments

MathWorks-solicited Java survey

MathWorks is soliciting user feedbacks about the use of Java components in Matlab programs.

March 23, 2017 2 Comments

I am hiring experienced Matlab programmers (Tel Aviv)

I am hiring a Matlab programmer in Tel Aviv

February 20, 2017 No Comments

Leuze (16 days 21 hours ago): Hello, I would like to add a new object into SLDD and display columns according to my object properties <>
Eric Delgado (45 days 23 hours ago): Hey Yair, I think your site is the right place to share that I wrote ccTools, a lib that allows a lot of customizations of Matlab built-in web components (such as uifigure,...
Eric Delgado (45 days 23 hours ago): Hey guys, first of all, thanks to @Yair, your site saved me a lot of times! 🙂 That’s why I am sharing that I wrote m2mlapp (*.m => *.mlapp) file conversion, that...
François (62 days 21 hours ago): more than 10 years later it helps me after struggling few hours, so thanks you very much !
Yair Altman (63 days 19 hours ago): I am not familiar with a universal catch-all tab-completion mechanism for all functions, and it also doesn’t make much sense to me, because different functions use...
Arye (64 days 13 hours ago): hi, is there a universal functionSignature.json file that will allow my to get the function hints when opening brackets of my funcs? something that automaticly recognize my function...
Sunham (67 days 8 hours ago): This is an old article, but the issue persists even in 2023. 2023a: z = mat2cell(1:1e6,1,repmat(1,1,1e 6)); f = @() cellfun(‘isempty’, z); g = @() cellfun(@isempty,z);...
Yair Altman (76 days 22 hours ago): Robot only runs when you tell it to run a command such as keyPress. If you don’t tell it to run a command, it uses no CPU, so there’s no need to remove the Robot...
Eric (77 days 9 hours ago): Hey @Kevin, can you share your code about create group of figures in the AppContainer? The container of multiples uifigures could be an amazing improvement over AppDesigner and its...
Elsa Smith (78 days 0 hours ago): I recently used java.awt.Robot to perform GUI testing on MATLAB and found it to be an extremely easy and useful way to control mouse movements.
Elsa Smith (78 days 0 hours ago): I’m suspecting that the slow performance of my GUI may be due to the use of java.awt.Robot. Is there a way to cancel/stop/remove the robot after it has been created, or is...
Michelle Kline (78 days 17 hours ago): *edit* tip about fopen(), not about fwrite(). ‘Wb’ vs. ‘wb’
Michelle Kline (78 days 17 hours ago): Thank you, Yair! With this previously-unknown-to-me tip about fwrite() performance, you have saved me literally hours of processing time. Michelle Kline Department of...
Alessandro Beda (91 days 5 hours ago): I found what I think is a bug related to this (tested in R2022 and R2023a). If I add a “ButtonDownFcn” to the plots (see example below), then the modified...
Nicholas (92 days 20 hours ago): Yair, Changing the desktop help options did not solve the issue. Though, it’s unclear how I could change these options in the Runtime, if that’s what you meant? I should...