Andi, you are such a tease! There are questions dotted around the web (including on this page) of people asking how to change the Quick-Access Toolbar programmatically, and getting no answer, and here you are saying that you’ve (sort of) done it! Saying it “works very unreliably” implies that it has worked for you at least once; maybe the change didn’t stick, maybe sometimes you get the dreaded red text at the command line and sometimes not – but it sounds like you were at least on the right path. I know that this is a massive long-shot given your post is almost five years old – but, if my post triggers an email to you – please could you tell us how you were updating the Quick-Access Toolbar?

I know that versions after 2018a now use favourites. Adding favourites to the Quick-Access Toolbar programatically is easy, using the .setIsOnQuickToolBar method of the com.mathworks.mlwidgets.favoritecommands.FavoriteCommandProperties class. However, I am still interested in how to programatically get shortcuts onto the Quick-Access Toolbar in 2017b and earlier. Thus far, I have a partial solution by editing the MATLABQuickAccess.xml file (thanks to Yair and this page for the inspiration for that idea…), but that file is only read at startup so you have to ask the user to restart MATLAB to see your changes, which is less than ideal. And if they don’t restart straight away, they could do things in MATLAB that undo the changes you’ve made to the xml file.

It may be July 2020 but at my company we are still using R2013b! This article was instrumental in helping me to accomplish my work.

Thanks!
Mike

There is a solution to create categories and get favorites, code, etc posted on nov 27.
I am playing with these ideas, and in the process of re-writing the Matlab code I wrote and maintained for more than ten years (following a Yair’suggestions, also many years ago) to save shortcuts when exiting Matlab so as to be able to restore those as they were on a specific day when exiting Matlab; a kind of laymen time machine for shortcuts.

I found scUtils still “works” in Matlab2018b, but it appears to process something which is distinct from the Favorites that were created when I first launched Maltab2018.
My first launching of Matlab2018b a few weeks ago followed a Matlab session ending under Matlab 2017b. On its first opening, Matlab2018b did some clean up on shortcuts it found and created their Favorites counterpart using the same name and the same code.
In my current usage of 2018b, scUtils can still see the old shortcuts and it will give shortcut names and code line exactly the same as those appearing under Favorites, provided those Favorites haven’t been modified with the favorite editor; after a favorite is edited, rerunning scUtils will show the original code, unchanged.

I saw this on Matlab Central : https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/411846-how-to-create-favorites-by-code-command-window
But there is no solution.

@Andi – I am not sure what exactly is not working for you in R2015a – it works well for me up to and including R2016a. Try to add a short pause() before you update the shortcuts on startup, maybe this will help. If you would like me to look at your specific issue for a small consulting fee, then email me.

Thank you for addressing the shortcut customization in MatLab.

The code to update the shortcuts during a session, which is discussed in your article, works very well in MatLab 2012a. However, it does not work reliably in MatLab 2015a, even though I tried to adapt it.

I have addressed this issue with Mathworks. The response was that they do not support this functionality.

I have also done some work, where I have tried to update the quick access toolbar, but again found, that is works very unreliably.

I am very interested in solutions for both issues, which work in MatLab 2015a.

Thanks, Andi