Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

April 6th, 2007

The point and click capabilities of the MATLAB desktop make it easy to learn and use but once you’ve worked with MATLAB for a while you may find that you are most productive keeping your fingers on the keyboard. To accommodate your high productivity work style the MATLAB desktop provides key combinations that let you move the keyboard focus among the desktop tools.

Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycle focus forward and backward, respectively, among the visible desktop tools.

Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown cycle focus forward and backward, respectively, among tabbed tools or documents such as M-files in the Editor.

Taken together the above key combinations let you move focus to any tool or document within the desktop.

Even so, the focus cycling approach can be cumbersome when you have a large number of tools or documents open. Furthermore, if you work with some of your tools undocked from the main desktop window you might find yourself also using your operating system’s window access key combination (e.g. Alt+Tab on Windows).

If you’re willing to devote a few more neurons to MATLAB key combinations, each desktop tool has an associated key combination that will move focus directly to it. These key combinations are listed on the Window menu.

The Window menu also dynamically assigns mnemonic keys to each open document (M-File, figure etc.). You can move focus to a particular document by pressing Alt+W to invoke the Window menu and then typing the mnemonic letter assigned to that document.

Since the goal is to increase your productivity with MATLAB I’ll let you get back to work now.

By Peter Muellers

Peter Muellers is a developer on the MATLAB desktop team. He works primarily on the desktop framework. Many of his better ideas occur while he is running, biking or sleeping.

07:00 UTC | Posted in Desktop | Permalink |

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3 Responses to “Keeping your fingers on the keyboard”

1. Daniel Andrews replied on September 13th, 2008 at 20:25 UTC :
   

   I’m using the 2007a Student edition of matlab on a windows vista operating system. I find that Ctrl+Shift+0 doesn’t send my cursor to the editor window - any ideas on what the problem might be?

2. Peter replied on September 16th, 2008 at 08:12 UTC :
   

   This appears to be a previously undiscovered, Vista specific, bug. Thank you for reporting it. I’ll enter it in our bug database and send you a patch.

3. Sung Soo Kim replied on February 11th, 2009 at 19:04 UTC :
   

   Cool~

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