Desktop Tools and Development Environment Features

MATLAB Release Notes

Desktop Tools and Development Environment Features

These are the new features and enhancements for the desktop tools and development environment in MATLAB 7.0.1.

Startup and Shutdown

When MATLAB starts, it now uses for librarypath.txt as well as classpath.txt to construct the Java classpath. If you call Java from MATLAB, refer to "Locating Native Method Libraries" in the MATLAB External Interfaces documentation for details. This was part of MATLAB 7.0.

Desktop

The MATLAB Web browser displays files up to 1.5MB. When the Web browser tries to open a file greater than 1.5MB, MATLAB instead automatically displays the file in the system default browser.
Additional desktop tools provide keyboard access to toolbar buttons and fields via mnemonics. For example, Alt+K moves the cursor to the Stack field in the Editor/Debugger toolbar. In the Profiler, the R in the Run this code toolbar field is underlined, indicating that Alt+R moves the cursor to this field. You might need to hold down the Alt key while the tool is selected in order to see the mnemonics on the menus and buttons.
On the Macintosh, the location of MATLAB menus has changed. In this version, MATLAB menus are not located at the top of the screen with other Macintosh screen menus. Instead, MATLAB menus appear within the MATLAB desktop and MATLAB tools. This change was made because of a problem with screen menus that caused MATLAB on the Macintosh to crash. See the Known Software and Documentation Problems for more information about the screen menus problem.

Running Functions--Command Window and History

There are now Command Window preferences you can set to perform parenthesis matching. Select File -> Preferences -> Command Window -> Keyboard and Indenting to set them. With the preference Match parentheses while typing selected, when you type a parenthesis or another delimiter, MATLAB highlights the matched parenthesis or other delimiter in the pair. With the preference Match parentheses on arrow key or mouse movement selected, when you move over a parenthesis or another delimiter, MATLAB highlights the matched parenthesis or other delimiter in the pair. MATLAB also alerts you to mismatches. These preferences also allow you to specify how MATLAB notifies you of matches and mismatches.
You can now select Clear Command Window from the context menu in the Command Window. A confirmation dialog box does not appear and the Command Window clears immediately. If you want a confirmation dialog box to appear before the Command Window clears, use Edit -> Clear Command Window instead.
With the Display preference for Wrap lines selected, pressing End moves the cursor to the end of the current statement. When the Command line key bindings preference is set to Emacs (MATLAB standard), you can also do this using Ctrl+E. In the previous version, End (and Ctrl+E) moved the cursor to the end of the current line.

Help for Using MATLAB

When you supply your own help files, you can now specify the type of icon that appears in the Help browser Contents pane via the <help_contents_icon> tag in the info.xml file. For details, see Adding Your Own Help Files in the Help Browser.

Workspace, Search Path, and File Operations

Array Editor

A keyboard shortcut to use instead of double-clicking a cell is F2 (or Ctrl+U on Macintosh), which allows you to edit the current element, positioning the cursor at the end of the element.
When you copy data from Microsoft Excel and paste it into a cell array in the Array Editor using the menu item Edit -> Paste Excel Data, MATLAB assumes the values are strings and automatically supplies the single quotation marks if they cannot be interpreted as numeric values.

File Operations

When you select the Current Directory preference Show M-file comments and MAT-file contents, the help shown now includes the first comment line (also called the H1 line).
You can now select text in the Command Window or Editor and the Find Files dialog box enters that text in its Find files containing text field.
The Current Directory browser preference for auto-refresh now allows you to specify the update time. By default, every 2 seconds the Current Directory browser checks for and reflects any changes you made to files and directories in the current directory using other applications.

In some cases when the current directory is on a network and the Current Directory browser is open, MATLAB becomes slow because of the auto-refresh feature. If you experience general slowness in MATLAB and have the Current Directory browser open, increase the default update time to improve responsiveness. If increases do not alleviate the slowness enough, clear the check box in preferences to turn auto-refresh off. Then you can manually refresh the display selecting Refresh from the context menu in the Current Directory browser.

Editing and Debugging M-Files

The Editor/Debugger supports breakpoints in anonymous functions. Lines containing anonymous functions can have more than one breakpoint in a line: one for the start of the line and one for each anonymous function in the line. A line that contains multiple breakpoints has a blue breakpoint icon.
The dbstatus function now supports anonymous and nested functions, including a new '-completenames' argument. Running dbstatus('-completenames') displays, for each breakpoint, the absolute filename and the sequence of functions that nest the function containing the breakpoint.
When you paste a selection from the Editor into another application, such as Word, the Editor now maintains the syntax highlighting colors in the file in the other application. MATLAB pastes the selection to the clipboard in RTF format, which many Windows and Macintosh applications support.
In an M-file, position the cursor within a subfunction, function, file, variable, or Simulink model, and press Ctrl+D (or right-click and select Open Selection). The item opens in the appropriate tool. In the previous version of MATLAB, you had to select the complete name in the M-file to use this feature. See Opening a Selection in an M-File for more information.

Publishing Results

Notebook

Notebook now supports Office 2003 (for XP); it is one of the notebook -setup options.
If you run Notebook from MATLAB and MATLAB is not an automation server, MATLAB will become an automation server. This is a change from Release 14, where MATLAB spawned a second instance that was an automation server.

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