Inside the MATLAB Desktop

November 26th, 2007

Giving your code some privacy

In R2007b, code folding was introduced in the Editor for functions and help comments. I find this particularly useful for large M-files like edit.m, which have a lot of subfunctions. By collapsing all the folds in the file, I can quickly skim through the helper subfunctions.

The Editor remembers which folds I had collapsed in each file, even between sessions of MATLAB, and I can choose to disable code folding if I wish from the preference panel:

At this point, I know what all of you are saying– “Why does this only work for functions? I want to be able to fold all my MATLAB keywords!”. Don’t worry, I’ve already heard you, and that will be in a future release. In the meantime, try out our first version of code folding and let us know what you think!

By Christina Roberts

Christina has been working on the MATLAB Editor since 2001. When she's able to tear herself away from that, she enjoys building furniture, playing the violin, and working on her poker skills.

10:01 am | Posted in Editor | Permalink |

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4 Responses to “Giving your code some privacy”

1. J.R.Menzinger replied on November 27th, 2007 at 6:37 am :
   

   That’s great!
   but… I’m waiting since 4 or 5 Releases for these option:
   SAVE BREAKPOINTS
   SAVE BREAKPOINTS CONDITIONS
   SAVE BOOKMARKS
   by leave the session.

   I think it should be easy to implement, isn’t it?

   Best Regards

   J.R.!

2. Ken replied on November 27th, 2007 at 12:48 pm :
   

   Hi J.R.,

   Your absolutely right! Saving breakpoints, breakpoint conditions and bookmarks are blatantly missing features.

   You can actaully save breakpoints and conditional breakpoints manually by doing the following:

   To save:

   >> mybreakpoints = dbstatus;
   >> save mydebugsession mybreakpoints

   To load:

   >> load mydebugsession mybreakpoints
   >> dbstop(mybreakpoints)

   We are currently working on more seamless ways to do this though.

   -Ken

3. Will Dampier replied on November 27th, 2007 at 6:01 pm :
   

   Personally, I love the new folding feature. I would love to see folding SWITCH statements since I often parse through dozens of input arguments to VARARGIN and they often take up 100 or more lines of particularly ugly code (try-catches, warnings messages, error messages, long conditional statements). I’ve started to put them into a large subfunction which modifies pre-initialized flag variables just so I can foldd it out-of-site but I don’t like habitually sharing variables between functions like that.

   Thanks
   Will

4. Christina Roberts replied on November 28th, 2007 at 9:49 am :
   

   Hi Will,

   We will fold switch statements in a future release. Thanks for letting us know how you are using code folding!

   -Christina

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