Inside the MATLAB Desktop
April 6th, 2007
Keeping your fingers on the keyboard
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.
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