Ken & Mike on the MATLAB DesktopDecember 29th, 2008Fantastic features of 2008 
You can see what we highlighted earlier this year for R2008a here, and R2008b here. We’ve got some great features planned for 2009, and as always we’ll be working on enhancing the overall user experience of MATLAB to include platform consistency and performance. Until then, here are a couple of questions Mike and I would love to hear your answers to:
18 Responses to “Fantastic features of 2008”Leave a Reply |
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I love the way things are going in the matlab-UI.
My wishlist is but one thing: I want to be able to control font colors in the command window output. If this feature appears I would be extremely pleased indeed :)
Thanks for the feedback Jonas. We’ve already got a feature request for allowing control over Command Window colors, so you’re not alone!
-Ken
@Jonas,
What would you do with colored text in the Command Window? Are you comfortable writing html, especially as MATLAB strings?
The new function hints is really helpful. Thanks for this.
As for new feature, do you have any plan to support Fortran syntax highlighting in MATLAB Editor?
Hi Jinhui,
We don’t have any specific plans to support Fortran, but we are currently working on making it easier to plug in new languages to the Editor.
-Ken
1) My favourite feature this year :Function hints that provide reminders of arguments while typing
2) The feature that I couldn’t imagine “living” without is to press F1 to open the related documentation when I type a function !
Hi Aurelien,
Chalk two up for Function Hints! We thought this feature would be a hit; and if you have a memory like mine (or lack thereof) then this feature is indispensable.
It’s also nice to hear that you’re using Help-on-selection. I think this is a relatively undiscovered gem thus far. I really like the way it smoothly integrates into my workflow.
Thanks for the feedback Aurelien!
-Ken
Function hints is awesome.
Spell checking in editor comments would be fun.
I like the hints as well.
I’d really like to see a better buffer switching mechanism (to use the emacs term). I open a file that I’m working in. 10 others get opened, and then I want to switch between file 1 and 10 easily, but instead I have to scroll through the tabs or go up to the window menu item. It would be great if there was a shortcut for “previous file”, even if this was just a two-file switch.
In emacs its done with M-x switch-buffer, which then gives you an intelligent list of possible files.
Thanks!
how about a proper and interactive way of setting up the compiler for xcode on the mac version? or at least a similar approach used for selecting visual studio on the windows version?
@Naor,
I too could use spell checking in the comments.
@Jody,
That’s a great request [an Emacs style switching mechanism]. Note that you can switch between open Editor documents using Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down. Does that help your workflow at all?
-Ken
@Naor,
We’re glad you’re enjoying the function hints. Spell checking is something we’re looking into, but there are some technical and other consideration we need to work out so we can deliver the right solution.
@Jody,
We don’t have a next/previous file shortcut. I tend to use the next/previous tab shortcuts (ctrl+page(up/down)), and to go to a particular file I use the Alt+W,(A,B,C,etc) depending on the file. On average, about how many files to do you keep open in the Editor?
@Jveer,
I assume you mean setting up a MEX compiler? I had just though Xcode uses gcc underneath. A list of supported compiler for the mac is here: http://www.mathworks.com/support/compilers/current_release/macintosh.html, and instructions are here: http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_external/f23674.html&http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_external/f23674.html#f23697.
As I am not really an expert in this area, I’ve emailed a friend who works on that that team to see if he could provide a better answer. I’ll respond back here when he gets back to me.
@Jveer,
I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some MEX-heads here and they confirmed the point about setting up in the usual way to use gcc. They also pointed out to me two solutions on our support page for setting up Xcode as a debugger 1-3U6RYL and 1-22BGKF.
They suggest that if you run into difficulty or have a more in-depth problem, opening up a dialogue with our technical support department and they’ll get you on your way.
Another helpful tweak to the F1 documentation in the editor would be to open the documentation of the function which you writing a call for. For example, if I have written this:
exist(’someFunc’,
I frequently hit F1 to look up the correct second argument. In 2008b, it opens the title page instead of the documentation for “exist,” even though the function hint was showing right under my cursor. It would also be very useful for the function hint to reappear when editing an existing function call.
I keep Matlab open for a while (good job on stability!) and can end up with 15 or 20 files, particularly if I have “dbstop if error” enabled. Right now I have 13 files open, maybe 2 of which I actually editing.
I use a macbook pro, or when I’m at my desktop, the small wireless mac keyboard. Unfortunately, there is no page-up or page-down, and medit has overwritten the alt-arrow-up chord to be cell-up or cell down (which are also great). Furthemore alt-w doesn’t work, and I can’t see any way to access the window menu by hand.
So, obviously some of this is just me and my dumb setup, however, it does speak to the possibility of having more flexible key bindings.
I just discovered your blog, & hope the following idea isn’t too late for consideration “someday”.. ;) It would be really great to be able to execute custom functions on workspace variables using just the mouse!
For example, the current right-click / plot functions menu offered in the Variable Editor pane could be made customizable & configurable. Users could make their own right-click function menus, and even maybe (please) access those functions from the Workspace as well as the Variable Editor.
Alternatively, toolbar shortcut programming could be generalized to allow shortcuts to take an argument via drag-and-drop from the workspace. To avoid ambiguity — what if there’s more than one variable reference in the shortcut code? — ML would probably have to enforce some kind of rule(s), but I assume this could be worked out without too much hassle..?
Brad,
Thanks for the suggestions. Those are good ones.
For Jody and for Ken’s response: I know exactly what you mean, especially when tracing scope levels after dbstop. A perhaps more useful way to implement this would be a variant of what I do. Implement this feature: create ability to undock only those files which are read/write, and make dbstop open its files readonly by default, and make a way to signify the writeable/undockable files. So one editor “viewer” window for readonly with many tabs, and one editor “edit” window for readwrite with a few tabs. (What I do now goes beyond undock: I disassociate my main editing from Matlab entirely, by keeping the file open in WordPad [or vi or nano would work]. The files open in the actual Matlab editor thus tend to be just the scope levels from the dbstop, so mainly readonly. This system does very rarely bite me though, as a file could get opened in two tools and diverge — so the capability above would be a welcome improvement to my clumsy method.)