Inside the MATLAB Desktop
December 24th, 2007
How well do you know your MATLAB desktop tools?
We’ve all been to events were there are lots of people we don’t know. Sometimes the event organizers provide name tags to help people like me who just can’t seem to retain new names in such a setting. When you gather with a small group of family members or friends name tags are generally unnecessary.
Hopefully after you have been using MATLAB for a while, the various tools that appear in the MATLAB desktop (the Command History, the Current Directory Browser, the Workspace Browser, etc.) will feel like old friends. Why then, should they continue to wear name tags, i.e. title bars? If you’ve gotten so that you recognize the various desktop tools on sight (or by their positions) you can dispense with their title bars, thereby making more space available for meaningful content. To do so, simply toggle the “Titles” item that appears at the bottom of the “Desktop” menu. You are left with narrow vestiges of the title bars as shown below.
You can still use these title bar vestiges to select tools and drag them around. They also offer equivalents of the various title bar buttons on a context (right-click) menu. They even offer the tool’s name on a tool tip (no need to be embarrassed about temporarily forgetting your long-time acquaintance’s name). Admittedly this is a very minor feature but MATLAB and the MATLAB desktop are all about enhancing your productivity, so if this helps even a little…
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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I like this feature and use it all the time. I prefer a clean and sleek desktop (both my physical desktop in my office and my MATLAB desktop). A few years ago I didn’t use the desktop at all (matlab -nodesktop, in Linux) but I now use it all the time since the look and feel of the Desktop has improved greatly in Linux over the past few releases.
I also remove the Toolbar and Shortcuts Toolbar. The only minor downside of removing the Toolbar (for me) is that the current working directory is no longer displayed. “pwd” is quick and simple, but it would be great if there could be an option to display the current working directory on the very top title bar of MATLAB itself - that’s unused real estate. This sort of behavior occurs in many other applications - a web browser uses that space to display the web page title, for example.
I’m glad to hear that you’ve found some of the small tuning capabilities useful. Thanks for the suggestion regarding display of the current working directory. I’ve entered into our internal database for future consideration.