Similar to what has happened with the wishlist threads (#1 #2 #3 #4 #5), the "what frustrates you about MATLAB" thread has become very large. This makes navigation difficult and increases page load times.
So here is the follow-up page.
What should you post where?
Next Gen threads (#1): features that would break compatibility with previous versions, but would be nice to have
@anyone posting a new thread when the last one gets too large (about 50 answers seems a reasonable limit per thread), please update this list in all last threads. (if you don't have editing privileges, just post a comment asking someone to do the edit)
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Is anyone else finding the 'Find Files' functionality in R2025a to be an annoying regression from older versions?
I must preface this by admitting there is always an element of 'I'm a grumpy old man and I hate any change' to my reaction to the interface changes that get thrust upon us, but this is annoying functionally, not just aesthetically.
For one, why is it now always docked? I hate docked windows normally - I undock the Editor, Figures, etc and I never want Find Files docked, but I seem to have to undock it every time.
Finding the options feels more difficult than it did before, too. Maybe they are all still there and it's just a 'it's a worse interface, just get used to it' scenario.
But the one that is really irritating me is there now seems to be no tabs. Throughout my Matlab usage I am very regularly hitting Ctrl+Shift+F in my code to find usages of a function in my repository and I would often have many tabs of Find In Files open. But now we just get one? And it doesn't autofill in the text I had selected when I press Ctrl+Shift+F like it used to so I have to go and copy-paste it in.
As something that is part of my 'bread and butter' day to day usage of Matlab I am really disappointed by this regression of fundamental functionality and unless I missed them I don't see any settings options to affect this.
I like the new tree structure for the results, but other than that I'm really missing R2024a right now!
This is not a frustration with Matlab itself, but the File Exchange website. It has obviously undergone various updates in the 18 years I've been using Matlab, but I used to find it very intuitive. Having not needed it for a while I was presented with this page (below).
Am I the only one who finds this very non user-friendly?
I would assume that overwhelmingly what people most want to do when they get here is to search for something, and it honestly took me a minute or more staring at this page trying to work out how to do that one, most wanted, activity.
I trie typing where it says Filter, up there in the top left, but that is just a button to collapse that panel. Eventually I realised it is that small magnifying glass lurking in the top corner, on the blue menu bar, which, to me is a very odd place for it (and why does it not have a visible box to type in before you click it, which would make it so much more obvious?).\r\nTo me, as a user of the site, that blue menu bar is where I choose which part of the site to visit - File Exchange or Matlab Answers, etc. Then I'm done with it and I'm looking at the page below that. It's not at all intuitive to me that the place I go to search, on this specific part of the website, is a little magnifying glass way over there on the right of that menu bar. Maybe it's just me, but as basically the only use case I have for File Exchange (to search for something I want) it is very unobtrusive and out of the way. It should be right there, top centre of the page itself, with a big search box ready for me to type in straight away.
Thanks for the feedback. We agree that File Exchange landing page design can be optimized to make the search box more prominent so that it’s easier for users to find the content. We’ve captured your idea for our project to update File Exchange landing page.
I agree with you. It's a problem not only with the Mathworks site but many, many other sites as well. I think text that says Search and then an edit text box to the right of it would be much better.
It seems a lot of web sites want to make it all with icons so it's not dependent on any one language, but at least with the English language version of File Exchange, there are English words all over the place so there's no reason or need to not have it for the Search capability.
@Greg Bacon I believe is the File Exchange head. @Shruti Shivaramakrishnan is a developer on it. Or at least they used to be.
Renaming signals in simulink has no shortcut.
Double-clicking a line to rename it is tedious and innacurate. Why not just allow direct renaming when that object is selected without double clicking?
Double clicks in general offer poor accessability for users.
Feel free to use the 'Ideas' Channel in the new MATLAB Central 'Discussions' section for the sort of conversation you were encouraging here Ideas - MATLAB Central Discussions (mathworks.com)
>> tAdd.IP=7;
To assign to or create a variable in a table, the number of rows must match the height of the table.
>>
No automagic expansion on table assignment...another need for b-ugly repmat() for no apparent reason...and there's no convenient shorthand 1D repmat() so have to remember to not forget the trailing ",1", too.
Unless you do remember there is repelem which I almost never do. But, it still doesn't quite fit the bill because you still have to transpose the result in which case may as well make it explicit with repmat() to start with.
Frustrating....
Actually your second example is more nearly the use case I had that prompted the complaint although I simplied it to just show the error. The use case of
t = table([1;2;3])
t=addvars(t,7,'After','Var1','NewVariableNames',{'NewVar'})
The specific case involved putting the new variable in a specific position within a table with a number of variables, not at the end that the t.NewVar(:) syntax does. While it does avoid the explicit vector creation, one then needs a second line to relocate it where needs to go.
I still think with the table class, both forms should be available...
With the table the height is known internally so it should be possible to simply expand the constant to the length needed behind the scenes, so "way back when" I tried to do that.
For some reason the analogous array syntax never struck me over the time the table has been in existence (and for the prior dataset object in the Stat TB before it got superceded (another rant over that, but that's another topic). I THINK that is probably owing to the specific text of the error message; it tells one what the problem is but it doesn't provide the hint as to another form for the expression; it implies one must assign the matching vector -- and with that particular LHS addressing, that is true.
On retrospect, it is apparent with the analogy that the (:) addressing would work, agreed; I admit I just didn't think of it Lo! those many years ago when first ran into it and had just used the klunky workaround by rote ever since, hadn't tried to find another syntax and for some reason it just didn't strike me to try...
My preference is able to have combinations returning simple standard array (with perhaps optional input argument to do so) not table.
@Bruno Luong thanks very much for sharing your example and experience. I'm happy to see that performance of combinations coupled with rowfun is close to that of your handwritten code and not orders of magnitude slower.
As a quick comment, you likely could write code that looks like this without the need for the wrapper:
FactorValuesCell = rowfun(@(varargin) cinematic(varargin{:}, PLenErrorArray1, LensErrorVariableNames) , ...
Tgammac, "OutputFormat", "cell", "SeparateInputs", false);
and perhaps that shaves off a bit of runtime.
All of this said, if you prefer your current approach and that works for you, then stick with it! That's part of the joy of MATLAB.
Having used it more extensively in the last number of months, my biggest frustrations still surround the App designer. It has improved massively since its early days, but some 'features' or lack of features are still immensely irritating for day to day usage, including (though I'm sure I forget some):
- Uneditable code - I understand why this is there, but Matlab is used by a lot of expert users as well as new users. It is ridiculous that we have no way to edit large blocks of code in an App Designer app. There ought to be an expert mode where you can simply edit anything you want, with all the risks that come with that in potentially making your app no longer work. I want to be able to edit the order of my properties and methods blocks - I always put my public ones at the top, private ones below, it's just my way of working - I don't want to enforce it on others, but I want the capability to do it myself. Also I always name my objects as 'obj' in every class I've written in over 10 years. Being forced to name it 'app' or 'comp' in un-editable function signatures is infuriating because I still just naturally use 'obj' in the code body without thinking and it wastes time fixing it.
- Public components - part of the same problem as the first point. I very rarely want all the components of my app to be public properties so that any external code can just mess with them as they choose. I want them private, and again, just having the option to do this is all I need. If other people want theirs public then fine, let them do that too, but at least give a choice to edit this.
- Save/debug behaviour - why does this behave differently to in the regular editor. It is so irritating and time-wasting when as a user of Matlab a way of working is ingrained in me from 17 years of working in the software and then this 'new' editor behaves differently. In the regular editor, when you are in debug mode you can edit a file and when you hit 'Save' it stops the debug and saves the file. I use this literally all the time when fixing bugs from a breakpoint. In App Designer you simply cannot save in Debug mode. You first have to click to stop debug and then save. Of course it's a small thing when you do it once, but when you are doing this 10s of times per day the inconsistency between the two editors seems totally un-necessary,.
I don't personally use any others these days. I used to program some using C++ and wxWidgets in the old days, but more recently only in Matlab. Previously within Matlab I would use GUIDE a long time ago and, more often, programmatic GUIs using java components and the GUI Layout Toolbox from File Exchange.
Edit Rik: added link to GUILT.
What other software/languages do you use to develop GUIs?
How slow getdata from the image acquisition toolbox is (at least for genicam cameras I have been working with). I had to drop matlab for our real time computer vision applications because of that.
Compare sldd files and publish a HMTL report using Matlab script:
I can compare .slx, .m, etc. files using the visdiff function and publish a report using the publish function like this:
compare = visdiff('File1.slx', 'File1_changed.slx');
publish(compare, 'format', 'html');
But I can´t do the same with .sldd files:
compare = visdiff('File1.sldd', 'File1_changed.sldd');
publish(compare, 'format', 'html');
Error using visdiff
Unable to compare 'C:\basic\File1.sldd' and 'C:\basic\File1_changed.sldd' without opening the Comparison Tool.
Why if I can generate an HTML report using the Comparision Tool in the same way, both for .slx and .sldd files?
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