Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

November 3rd, 2008

The new Address Bar in the Current Directory Browser provides many point and click ways to navigate around your MATLAB file folders. The MATLAB current folder location is displayed as a series of buttons (or breadcrumbs) representing each subfolder in the path. This enables single-click transitions between folders above your current location.

Instead of traditional slashes between folders in the path, there are drop-down menus displaying subfolders at each level. Select a subfolder to navigate to (notice the current location is in bold).

Use the Forward and Back buttons to jump to previously viewed directories.

Select an entry on the history drop-down for quick transition to a recent folder location.

Or, if you enjoy typing, click on white space in the address bar to convert the display into a regular old backslash-separated pathname for editing and viewing.

Whether you are veteran or a newbie we think the new Current Directory navigation will enhance your file navigation experience. It has the best of both worlds - it’s easy to visually navigate, and it’s easy to manually enter a path.

Let us know what you think.

By Lori Tavis

Lori is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. She works primarily on the Current Directory Browser and Preferences. She enjoys writing Java and C++ code when not in a minivan driving her kids from one event to another.

07:53 UTC | Posted in Current Directory | Permalink |

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4 Responses to “Meet the new Current Directory navigation bar”

1. Chris Rodgers replied on November 4th, 2008 at 09:37 UTC :
   

   A feature I’d like to see for handling file names is the ability to customise TAB completion in the command window.

   e.g. the built in save, print, etc. commands do TAB completion knowing that the argument is a filename.

   Could we have the ability to add this filename completion for our own functions?

   C.

2. Mike replied on November 4th, 2008 at 10:41 UTC :
   

   Chris,

   This is currently not possible. One “trick” is to put a bang “!” at the beginning of the line do the tab completion, press “home” and delete the “!”. The bang operator is a shorthand for sending the command to the system shell, and supports tab completion for file names.

   Mike

3. The New Current replied on March 25th, 2009 at 22:44 UTC :
   

   That’s a really beautiful GUI!

4. Daniel Armyr replied on September 7th, 2009 at 07:21 UTC :
   

   I have noticed a troubling side-effect of the new current directory browser.

   I work with matlab objects. I often save these in .mat files. If one of these .mat files are selected the objects will be loaded by the preview function. When this happens I cannot edit the classdef files as matlab has them loaded in memory and will refuse to refresh. I get an error telling me to clear, but clearing will not clear the .mat file preview.

   This is sort of like back in early windows-95 when you tried to move a directory, but you couldn’t if it was expanded because then it was considdered open by a program, that program being explorer that was being used to move the directory.

   –DA

   –DA

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