Comments on: What’s Your Color Scheme? https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/?s_tid=feedtopost Jiro and Sean share favorite user-contributed submissions from the File Exchange. Thu, 11 Jul 2019 17:00:19 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 By: Brett Shoelson https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/#comment-29284 Thu, 11 Jul 2019 17:00:19 +0000 https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/?p=10737#comment-29284 @Yair,
Thanks for the note, Yair. Truth be told, I didn’t look at Scott’s code before I “Picked” it; I was focused on the functionality instead. (You know that we typically try not to pick submissions that rely on undocumented MATLAB, as they are not guaranteed to work in some future version.) So…yes, caveat emptor…
Brett

]]>
By: Yair Altman https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/#comment-29270 Fri, 28 Jun 2019 16:34:41 +0000 https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/?p=10737#comment-29270 Scott’s utility is excellently written (in terms of functionality, documentation and code quality) and has an almost-perfect review rating of 5.00 from over 200 reviewers – this feat is quite extraordinary in the File Exchange and worth mentioning separately. Few File Exchange authors have posted utilities that have such a near-perfect rating from so many independent reviewers. It is also another example of utilities originally posted on GitHub and reported on File Exchange (there are too few of these, unfortunately). Kudos are well in order.

That said, users should be aware that Scott’s utility is based entirely on undocumented aspects, namely the preservation of color settings in the matlab.prf file, and the Java classes and methods that process them. My cprintf utility also relies on these features, which I originally published in 2009 – http://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/changing-system-preferences-programmatically [Scott references this post in his utility], as well as in my blog’s very first post: https://undocumentedmatlab.com/blog/changing-matlab-command-window-colors.

I find it refreshing to see that increasingly in recent years you are not shying away from highlighting utilities that rely on undocumented features, as long as they provide added value to users, as Scott’s utility evidently does. The number and quality of independent reviews clearly shows that many users find such utilities enormously useful.

It is amazing, and to MathWorks’ credit, that such undocumented features have remained working for over a decade. However, they may well stop working at any upcoming Matlab release. So I believe that at the very least, a corresponding warning to this effect should be posted for the benefit of users. With such a warning notice, users will not complain to MathWorks when these undocumented features will [one day] eventually break. I have already seen indications of this, with settings in the legacy matlab.prf file (including the color settings that Scott’s utility uses) being duplicated [presumably as a precursor to being replaced in the near future] by XML settings in the matlab.settings file, both of them located in the user’s prefdir folder. So caveat emptor…

]]>
By: Brett Shoelson https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/#comment-29223 Sun, 19 May 2019 22:04:51 +0000 https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/?p=10737#comment-29223 @Ander: Very good feedback–thank you! I have shared it with our Development team.
Brett

]]>
By: amin ya https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/#comment-29221 Fri, 17 May 2019 23:47:43 +0000 https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/?p=10737#comment-29221 This does not work for MATLAB Live scripts.

]]>
By: Ander Biguri https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/2019/05/17/whats-your-color-scheme/#comment-29219 Fri, 17 May 2019 13:10:17 +0000 https://blogs.mathworks.com/pick/?p=10737#comment-29219 The schemer is great! However it has a drawback, and its not Scott’s fault. I dare to say that most users want to it set up a dark scheme. However, there are a lot of things that can not get the color changed, such as the line numbers in the scripts, or side bars, and generally all the frames around all the objects in the GUI. This means that while you can set up a dark scheme, they are quite ugly, and I personally find the white borders distracting, comparing to most of the other profesional text editors in the market. Request to MATLAB: let us change the color of those things too! the MATLAB GUI is great, but needs some updating!

]]>