"Smart"/Silent Figure

Create or switch to a figure without it stealing focus from other windows.

Description

In Windows, MATLAB R14's FIGURE behaviour can be annoying. Namely, whenever we invoke figure/figure(X), it immediately jumps to the foreground, and steals focus from whatever other window was active, preventing you from switching to other processes, the MATLAB editor window, etc... (if you are repeatedly switching between figures/displaying results in a loop). This wrapper to figure makes FIGURE silent -- ie. if you had figure X in the background, then the call figure(X) will keep that figure in the background.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; Let me work, figure!
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.0.1 (R14SP1)

[Stephen Hole]

Very useful.
Thanks!

[Jean-Yves Tinevez]

Usefull !
Is there a way to tweak the "axes" command in the same way ? So that one can update an existing figure without stealing the focus...

[Matt Hilt]

You can quiet the axes by first setting the current figure as is done by this function, then setting the current axes in that figure.

Eg.
set(0,'currentFigure',figureHandle)
set(figureHandle,'currentAxes',axesHandle)

[Brian Armstrong]

Helpful.

It would be nice to be able to separately control whether the figure come to the top and whether it steals the focus. Especially
in X windows.

[Curtis I]

Hah! This is awesome. Thanks!

[Adrian G]

Works perfectly. Thanks!

[Sorin Z]

Very very useful for Mac OSX!! Thanks.

[Sorin Z]

 

[Dominic Barone]

You can make it more like figure() by using varargout. This way you can avoid having to put a semi-colon at the end.

Change the function call to:
function varargout = sfigure(h)

And add this to the end:
if nargout == 1
varargout{1} = h;
end