Ken & Mike on the MATLAB Desktop

September 4th, 2009

R2009b is here, and with it come a host of great new features in the MATLAB Desktop. Mike will be giving a full overview of the new Desktop features on Monday, but I wanted to call out one particular feature that just can’t wait until then: fully customizable keyboard shortcuts

I think this is one of our most requested features, at least on this blog. Let us know what you think!

By Ken Orr

Ken is a developer on the MATLAB Desktop team. He loves the art of graphic design as well as developing visually pleasing user interfaces - he's one of those 'crazy' Mac guys!

12:45 UTC | Posted in Command Window, Current Directory, Desktop, Editor, Help Browser, Preferences | Permalink |

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11 Responses to “R2009b is here!”

1. yonatron replied on September 4th, 2009 at 14:51 UTC :
   

   Well, someone has to ask: is there an official stance on when the Student Version will be available in R2009b? I seem to recall that on the last 2 versions it didn’t lag to far behind the full-price release.

2. Yair Altman replied on September 5th, 2009 at 17:12 UTC :
   

   This is indeed a great addition to the preferences, thanks :-) Unifying the keyboard bindings of the editor and the Command Window was a good design decision, since it caused discrepancies in earlier Matlab releases.

   Those who have Matlab versions earlier than R2009b, can use one of the following two File Exchange utilities to customize their keyboard shortcuts:

   1. EditorMacro - http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/24615
   2. KeyBindings - http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/25089

   Yair

3. Gagan Sidhu replied on September 6th, 2009 at 16:36 UTC :
   

   Hi, I tried to purchase the educational version of r2009b online and I can’t. After I made the account, when I go to the store it gives me an HTTP error.
   To make matters worse, I couldn’t select the country when I made my account to say where I was from.
   The same situation would occur when I didn’t login and tried to purchase.

   Any advice? I want this badly. I have a machine learning course that makesh eavy use of matlab and I’d love a version without x11

   Thx

4. Thomas replied on September 7th, 2009 at 13:11 UTC :
   

   still a few niggles with the new release (on a mac, running snow leopard):
   - ML still calls X11!?
   - Mac-style appearance would be nice (menu bar)
   - buttons in dialog boxes are off (see for example the ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons when prompt uigetfile)
   - *customizable* shortcuts for the main windows (command window and editor) would be really, really useful!!
   - assigned shortcuts in GUIs (->menu editor) don’t work

5. Ken replied on September 7th, 2009 at 19:01 UTC :
   

   Thomas,

   Many of the items you bring up are addressed by Ken A. here. As Ken A. also pointed out here we are working on the menu bar issue.

   I’m not sure what you mean by “*customizable* shortcuts for the main windows (command window and editor) would be really, really useful!!” or “assigned shortcuts in GUIs (->menu editor) don’t work”. Could you elaborate?

   -Ken

6. Ken replied on September 7th, 2009 at 19:17 UTC :
   

   @Gagan,

   Please contact customer support here.

   -Ken

7. Thomas replied on September 7th, 2009 at 21:41 UTC :
   

   Hi Ken,
   many of the shortcuts you are now allowed to customize are irrelevant to my work flow. Useful to me would be assigning/ changing the shortcuts to jump between main window, the editor and GUIDE interface. At the moment I’m cycling through all the open windows using the cmd+~ combination. However, addressing them individually with a shortcut would be better/ faster. The shortcuts you assigned (cmd+0 and cmd+shift+0) are simply not working for me, i.e. I would like to change them to say: commad window -> cmd+1, editor-> cmd+2, help browser-> cmd+3, guide interface-> cmd+4

   The other issue I mentioned was that you can give shortcuts for commands/ buttons in the GUIDE (see under Tools> Menu editor> Accelerator). I never got them to work, regardless which key combination I chose. With every release I hope you might fix this…

8. Ken replied on September 8th, 2009 at 13:03 UTC :
   

   Hi Thomas,

   The shortcuts for individual tools are currently dynamically generated. You can submit an enhancement request for those to be customizable here.

   I can’t reproduce the second item you mention. I created a GUIDE UI, and add a menu item with a shortcut key (I chose Cmd+D). I put a disp in the callback of that menu item, and verified that I saw the print-out when I pressed Cmd+D. Note that menus (the container for menu items) will not respond to shortcuts as this is not standard Mac OS X behavior.

   -Ken

9. Steve replied on October 10th, 2009 at 22:25 UTC :
   

   There is an issue with Windows 7 that is not really serious, but should be fixed eventually.

   In Windows 7, when an application pinned to the taskbar is executed, the icon in the taskbar has a border to show it is active.

   When MATLAB is pinned to the taskbar, and it is executed, a new “taskbar icon” is created with the running instance of MATLAB.

10. John replied on October 13th, 2009 at 13:16 UTC :
    

    Let me echo Steve’s comment on the Windows 7 taskbar issue. I find that I frequently launch an extra version of Matlab when I click on the wrong set of taskbar buttons. It’s annoying

    I suppose some people may want to launch multiple versions of matlab, but for myself, I’d rather have Matlab be more taskbar-aware (keep one set of icons). Make this confgurable perhaps?

11. Tobias replied on October 21st, 2009 at 09:37 UTC :
    

    I must agree with John and Steve. In windows 7 matlab isn’t that taskbar friendly and I regulary open multiple instances of matlab.

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