@Kasim – it would have been nice if you included a reference to this webpage in your utility’s description. After all, it’s based on the content of this webpage (specifically, the \b trick). It is not very polite to use someone’s work without acknowledging it; to then go back to that source and post a link to your work only increases the apparent impoliteness…

The utility itself does indeed seem useful.

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/44673

***Sample usage:

dispstat('','init'); % One time only initialization 
dispstat(sprintf('Begining the process...'),'keepthis','timestamp'); 
for i = 97:100 
    dispstat(sprintf('Progress %d%%',i),'timestamp'); 
    %doing some heavy stuff here 
end 
dispstat('Finished.','keepprev');

***Output:

11:25:37 Begining the process... 
11:25:37 Progress 100% 
Finished.

>> set(gcf,'currentcharacter','');
??? Error using ==> set
Bad value for figure property: 'CurrentCharacter'.

The following, however, works:

>> set(gcf,'currentcharacter',char(0));
>> c=get(gcf,'currentcharacter')
c =
     ''
>> double(c )  %% really empty (not 0)? ... apparently, yes!
ans =
     []

Apparently, the ‘CurrentCharacter’ property can -in principle- be used to get/set virtually any char(0…255), incl. those for which no keys exist on the keyboard. However, I cannot exclude unexpected effects under different Matlab versions and OSs.