{"id":3593,"date":"2026-01-14T09:37:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T14:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/graphics-and-apps\/?p=3593"},"modified":"2026-01-14T09:37:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T14:37:24","slug":"introducing-new-interactions-system-in-matlab-r2025a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/graphics-and-apps\/2026\/01\/14\/introducing-new-interactions-system-in-matlab-r2025a\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing New Interactions System in MATLAB R2025a"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"Portrait<\/td>\nGuest Writer: Will Jackson<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Will Jackson serves as the manager of the interactions and accessibility team for MATLAB. Will joined MathWorks in 2008 and contributed to the charting and interactions areas as a developer before becoming a manager.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n
I\u2019m Will and I\u2019ve developed interactive tools for exploring graphics in MATLAB for many years and I\u2019m now the manager of the graphics interactions and accessibility team. Graphics interactions come in the form of panning, zooming, rotating, creating a datatip, or some other change to graphics objects using the mouse, keyboard or touch. Today, I\u2019m going to share some key points about how interactions work differently in our new web-based graphics system, introduced in R2025a, and how you can best take advantage of it!<\/div>\n
When we began the transition to web technologies, we knew right away that we wanted graphics interactions to be more flexible and contextual than the system we had and we wanted to provide these at a high performance no matter how you use MATLAB, like in the Live Editor, a deployed web app, MATLAB Online or of course, the desktop. We also knew that we wanted to maintain compatibility with the existing system and ensure that longstanding interactions code be able to continue to work for everyone.<\/div>\n
Contextual Interactions<\/span><\/div>\n
Let\u2019s start with contextual interactions. It used to be the case that interaction customization could only occur at the figure level and when you wanted to explore your axes, you enabled, disabled and customized how you interacted at a figure level. For example, you could say that zoom should work only in the horizontal direction in your figure with,<\/div>\n
\n
\n
z = zoom;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
z.Motion = \"horizontal\"<\/span>;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This restricts zooming to the horizontal direction for all axes in the figure which may not be desired.<\/div>\n
Over the years, we\u2019ve expanded the number of customizations users can make to their axes and created charts with highly customized interactions. For the web-based graphics system, we\u2019ve moved to a more contextual system where interactions are enabled, disabled and customized at an axes or chart level or even below that, at the object level (see the doc for DataTipTemplate<\/a> for how to customize the contents of a datatip on a particular object like a line). For example, here is how you restrict pan and zoom to one direction on an individual axes.<\/div>\n
\n
\n
ax = axes;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
ax.InteractionOptions.LimitsDimensions= \"x\"<\/span>;<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
This enables pan and zoom in only the x-direction and only for the specified axes. This becomes critical when you have multiple axes in a figure, and you want them to interact in different ways.<\/div>\n
Using the InteractionOptions property on axes is the new, most up-to-date way we have to customize interactions and should be used over previous methods. There are even significant performance benefits as well which we\u2019ll explore in the next section. Different kinds of axes have different customizations available to them and hence have different InteractionOptions properties since they support different kinds of interactions. For more information on InteractionOptions in various axes, see our doc pages here,<\/div>\n