This weekend, Kenn Orr, Matlab’s desktop development team leader, announced an important and long-awaited feature that becomes available in the upcoming R2009b release: the ability to customize keyboard bindings in the system preferences [1].
This is indeed an important preference customization, which has often been requested. At first look, it appears that the desktop design team has done a good job of enabling easy keyboard shortcuts customization, saving and loading sets of shortcuts etc. – all in a new easy-to-use preference page.
This need has been addressed in the past by my EditorMacro utility [2], its expansions (here [3] and here [4]), and Perttu Ranta-aho’s KeyBindings [5] derivative utility.
Kudos for a job apparently well-done for the Matlab dev team aside, there may still be reasons for using EditorMacro and/or KeyBindings:
- Earlier Matlab versions – those who have a Matlab release earlier than R2009b have no option but to use these utilities. The first version of EditorMacro even supported Matlab 6.0, now almost a decade old!
- Programmatic access – some users may wish to have programmatic access to the keyboard bindings. For example, by saving sets of bindings in an m-file and accessing any of these sets via GUI or the desktop shortcuts toolbar. Note that in R2009b, these preferences can probably be accessed programmatically via the preferences interface, explained here [6].
- Understanding the underlying workings of the Matlab desktop and editor, for those interested in exploring and using these undocumented subjects.
User-contributed utilities, especially those relying on undocumented features like EditorMacro and KeyBindings, will always pale next to sleek GUI preferences which are well-integrated by design. They have a place in niche usages, as explained above, but the hope is that all these needs will eventually be addressed by well-documented integrated features, exactly as happened in this particular case.