Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

November 3rd, 2008

Meet the new Current Directory navigation bar

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.

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

  1. Chris Rodgers replied on :

    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 :

    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 :

    That’s a really beautiful GUI!

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Ken & Mike work on the MATLAB Desktop team.
  • Ustun Ozgur: I use KDE as my window manager on Linux. I use multiple desktops, and each different application resides...
  • Ken: @Kevin, Sounds like a nice setup. We’d love to see screen shots (you can email us at desktop_blog_feed...
  • yash: Thank you Jackson.
  • Ken: @Kelly, You can move the document bar to the right (or left or top) in R2007a. Note that you can easily jump...
  • Yair Altman: @Christian et al - I have now uploaded to the File Exchange a utility called EditorMacro, which enables...
  • Kevin: Hey Ken, I dual monitor my desktop so I typically have the Matlab editor undocked and taking up the main...
  • Kelly: In what version was the ability to move the document bar to the right introduced? I often have up to a dozen...
  • Jackson Shen: Hi Yask, Add the following code in “startup.mR 21; located in “C:\MATLAB\...
  • yash: Hello, I was wondering if it is possible to get new figures docked inside the figures “windowR...
  • Ken: Hi Christian, That’s pretty hard-core (I mean that in a most positive way)! Your observations are...

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.