How to make a Text Area auto-scroll to bottom (created in app designer)

I created a Text Area in app designer. It is populated with status messages as the app runs. After a while the area fills with lines of text, and the vertical scroll bar appears, but new messages are written in the invisible part of the area. The user has to scroll down "by hand". How can I make the Text Area autoscroll, so that each new message is visible?

[Eric Sargent]

As of R2020b uitextarea now supports scroll.

In this case you could use:

scroll(textArea, 'bottom')

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.ui.container.tree.scroll.html?searchHighlight=scroll%20uitextarea&s_tid=srchtitle

Answer 1

[Eric Sargent]

As of R2020b uitextarea now supports scroll.

In this case you could use:

scroll(textArea, 'bottom')

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.ui.container.tree.scroll.html?searchHighlight=scroll%20uitextarea&s_tid=srchtitle

[Frank van Diggelen]

Thank you. This is working well for me from in an app built in appdesigner, in R2022a:

scroll(app.MyTextArea, 'bottom') %autoscroll text area to bottom

Answer 2

[Chris Portal]

If it's possible to use a listbox instead of a text area, you would be able to use the scroll function to programmatically scroll specific items into view:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/scroll.html

[Marko Antila]

Scroll function does not work properly with App Designer List Box, unfortunately:

• in startFcn it hides the List Box (permanently)
• in callbacks it does exactly nothing