Thanks!

@Don – you can control the components of controllib.widget.Slider using its internal properties, as follows:

>> warning off MATLAB:structOnObject  % avoid warning
>> hSlider = controllib.widget.Slider(hFigure, [10,10,100,50], 1:20);
>> sSlider = struct(hSlider)
s = 
  struct with fields:
         Data: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20]
        Index: 10
        Value: 10
     FontSize: 8
     Position: [10 10 100 50]
        Data_: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20]
       Index_: 10
       Scale_: 'linear'
         Axes: [1×1 Axes]
        Lines: [2×1 Line]
          Dot: [1×1 Patch]
     Steppers: [2×1 Patch]
         Text: [1×1 Text]
        Cache: []
    Listeners: [1×1 event.listener]
       RADIUS: 0.25
       OFFSET: 0.75
        THETA: [1×41 double]
           XC: [1×41 double]
           YC: [1×41 double]
>> set(allchild(sSlider.Axes),'Visible','off');  % or 'on' to make visible again
>> warning on MATLAB:structOnObject  % restore warning

You can also control individual slider components this way. For example, to hide the stepper triangles on the right and on the left:

set(sSlider.Steppers,'Visible','off')

To delete the slider altogether, delete its container axes:

delete(sSlider.Axes)

You can do this with practically all of them. See here for example: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/continuous-slider-callback

I’m trying to implement a slider where the limits automatically expand as you get to the edges. I don’t think this is possible with uicontrol, and i wonder if it’s possible with the others.

@Medi – I am not sure what you mean. I discussed a slider that has several knobs (“range slider”) here: http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/sliders-in-matlab-gui#range

@Zoltan – R2015b is 6 releases older than the latest Matlab release, so surely this is no surprise. New functions are being added to Matlab with each new release. If you upgrade to one of the latest Matlab releases you will be able to use this function.