There is no direct way to replicate the CW in a GUI window, you’ll need to display the text in the GUI using your program logic.
Here is one possible implementation that could assist you: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/rich-contents-log-panel

@Ale – First, did you really expect some undocumented functionality that I wrote about back in 2009 to continue working in 2015 ?! Be realistic!

Secondly, it turns out that somewhere along the years the required JTextArea handle moved from being stored in listeners(3) to listeners(4) (read the comments above!) and then listeners(5).

In short, you can’t expect undocumented features to remain exactly as-is, unchanged, for so many years. At the very least you need to invest a bit of effort to check around and see maybe only a small thing has changed (as in this case). And in any case, you need to spend the time to at least read other peoples’ comments to see whether they answer your question.

Nothing personal 🙂

If I try any of the proposed commands, I get:

set(jTextArea,'Background','yellow');
Error using set
The name 'Background' is not an accessible property for an
instance of class 'com.mathworks.mde.cmdwin.CmdWinUndoManager'.

These are the properties of the object:

get(jTextArea)
                         Class: [1x1 java.lang.Class]
                    InProgress: 1
                         Limit: 100
              PresentationName: ''
          RedoPresentationName: 'Redo'
                   Significant: 0
    UndoOrRedoPresentationName: 'Undo'
          UndoPresentationName: 'Undo'

and these are the methods:

methods(jTextArea)

Methods for class com.mathworks.mde.cmdwin.CmdWinUndoManager:

addEdit                        insertUpdate                   
canRedo                        isInProgress                   
canUndo                        isSignificant                  
canUndoOrRedo                  notify                         
changedUpdate                  notifyAll                      
die                            redo                           
discardAllEdits                removeUpdate                   
end                            replaceEdit                    
equals                         setLimit                       
getClass                       toString                       
getLimit                       undo                           
getPresentationName            undoOrRedo                     
getRedoPresentationName        undoableEditHappened           
getUndoOrRedoPresentationName  wait                           
getUndoPresentationName        
hashCode        

Is there any way to do the same on this matlab version?
Thank you for your precious work.

@Lea – you can do it by accessing the Command Window’s XCmdWndView component, which is basically just a Java Swing JTextArea with a few Matlab customizations. You can get started in this article describing my cprintf utility.

Kudos for the great blog!
I wonder if there’s a way to manipulate the already printed text in the command pane. Could be useful for ‘realtime’ text animation (progress indication).

p.s. Beside the obvious solution to manipulate the line with control characters… I mean lines from previous prints.

10x,
Lea

Here is another method that I just found:

rows = builtin('_getcmdwinrows');
cols = builtin('_getcmdwincols');

These built-in functions are defined in %matlabroot%/bin/registry/libmwservices.xml

@Cariacou – yes, here’s how:

% Get the Command Window's text-area reference
cmdWinDoc = com.mathworks.mde.cmdwin.CmdWinDocument.getInstance;
listeners = cmdWinDoc.getDocumentListeners;
jTextArea = listeners(4);  % this could be listeners(3) in some Matlabs - check your specific case!

% Get the containing viewport's visible window width
visibleWidth = jTextArea.getAccessibleParent.getVisibleRect.getWidth;

% Divide by the character width (assume monospace font)
font = jTextArea.getFont;
charWidth = jTextArea.getFontMetrics(font).stringWidth('m');
numChars = visibleWidth / charWidth;

I was reading through this post and tried to find a few attributes of the command window that I could use to personalize my programm but couldn’t find them.

do you know by chance how to get the size of the command window ?
I would like to use the number of characters that can be displayed without having to slide left and right.

thanks !

@George – interesting use-case indeed. Thanks for sharing.