Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

May 18th, 2009

Oftentimes I find myself working not just on one MATLAB file, but a whole project-full of multiple files. When I’m in a multi-file mode, I like to know how my code is doing and how much cleanup work I still have to do to get the files into a stable, presentable state. The M-Lint code checker built in to the Editor is a great tool for analyzing and fixing a single file, but not practical when you have a bunch of files.

Why open a series of files consecutively and tab between them just to find the outstanding messages when you can use the M-Lint report to see them all at once?

The report lets you see all the unresolved warnings and errors in all your files at once. This provides a quick way to gauge the health of your project.

There are two ways to get to the M-Lint report. First is through the Current Directory Browser:

The other is through the mlintrpt command. By default The M-Lint report uses your active M-Lint configuration, but you can use this command to specify an alternative configuration. See our previous post about M-Lint configurations for more details.

Let us know how M-Lint has helped or hindered your project-wide workflows.

By Michael Katz

Mike is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. When not describing himself in the third person, biking, homebrewing, or rooting for the home team, he's busy trying to make the world a better place for programming.

14:33 UTC | Posted in Current Directory, M-Lint | Permalink |

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7 Responses to “M-Lint across a project”

1. George replied on May 19th, 2009 at 04:15 UTC :
   

   This is useful - glad I stumbled upon it. What I’m looking for, though, is how to easily search and replace all occurrences of a whole word in multiple files (i.e. all files in a directory). Basically, I want the same functionality provided by Ctrl+F with the “whole words only” option but with the ability to perform on multiple files at once.

   After writing my PSO toolbox, I decided that some of my variables could have been named more transparently. For example, “Ns” could be named “num_trials_successful” so as to be obvious in meaning to any user. I’ve been going through the process: Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+F, Alt+A (with “whole words only” selected), click in m-file, Ctrl+S, click new tab, repeat. But lately I’ve been breaking my code up into m-files of specific purpose to make it easier to understand, and making project-wide improvements is now a more painful process.

   A simple search and replace is not what I want though since “ns,” for example, could occur within words, which is why I want to keep the “whole words only” option.

   Any ideas???

2. Aurélien Queffurust replied on May 19th, 2009 at 06:42 UTC :
   

   @George : Are you looking for the “Find Files tool” (just select Edit > Find Files from any desktop tool):
   Finding Files and Content Within Files in Any Directory
   http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_env/f10-14803.html#brpyzt7-1

   For all my projects I use M-Lint to find unused variables or variables growing in the loop for example.

   Aurélien

3. Mike replied on May 19th, 2009 at 12:42 UTC :
   

   George,

   This is a capability we’re definitely interested in bringing to the editor. If you think it’s safe to a string replace, you can use regexrep and file i/o to just parse through your files and replace a string. It’s not as nice or clean as it will be when we have a GUI.

   files = what;
   mfiles = files.m;
   for n = 1:length(mfiles)-1;
       afile = mfiles{n};
       fid = fopen(afile);
       txt = textscan(fid,‘%s’,‘delimiter’,‘\n’,‘whitespace’,”);
       fclose(fid);
       txt = txt{1};
       txt = regexprep(txt,pattern_string,replacement_string);
       fid = fopen(afile,‘w+’);
       fprintf(fid,‘%s\n’,txt{:});
       fclose(fid);
   end

4. Subhankar replied on July 29th, 2009 at 08:00 UTC :
   

   Hi i pretty happy with this concept, but is there any way we can make our customize file as read only , bcoz if you ignore this mLint warning in editor it updates the mLint configuaration file , is there any way to disable “Ignore This “m-Lint ” on right click.

5. Mike replied on August 6th, 2009 at 14:59 UTC :
   

   There’s no way to disable the disabling of a message. You can make an individual configuration file read only on the system, but that won’t prevent a user from changing his configuration.

6. Tom replied on August 20th, 2009 at 20:17 UTC :
   

   Can we please make these tools have a “recursive” option? Would be very useful, especially for code written using package directories!
   Thanks!

7. Mike replied on August 20th, 2009 at 20:32 UTC :
   

   Tom,

   Thanks for the suggestion. These tools predate classes and packages and the infrastructure they use doesn’t really deal well with the workflow. We’re working on a much more useful and comprehensive solution, but that will take a few releases.

   Thanks for the suggestion.

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