What frustrates you about MATLAB? #2
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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Since the release of dark mode in R2025a, I’ve noticed a lot of performance degradation in R2026a (windows 10 platform). For example:
1. The figure plotting function takes tens of seconds to start the first time.
2. MATLAB itself also takes tens of seconds to launch the first time, especially when installed on non‑SSD drives.
3. Simulink generally starts slowly — even opening a simple .slx file for the first time can take more than ten seconds.
4. Start the parallel pool in MATLAB
5. Open the Settings window from the main MATLAB Desktop
6. ...
This might be the wrong place. I still use R2024b because I am not a fan of the newer tab-style side panels. I like the dark mode integration of the newer updates, but the older interface seems simpler and feels better to me. I feel like the new additions for the side panels could have been either right-click menus or drop-down menus on the panel title bar rather than a separate space.
I have been trying to use and export the new live scripts in 2025b and it all works great until you want to add a bunch of more complex plots.
Plots with many objects (many axes in a figure, texts etc) are very often displayed awkwardly. Sometimes I plot one figure, it all displays fine, I plot the next and then the previous figure gets messed up even though it is a completely separate figure. Fontsizes are often also displayed awkwardly, which is sort of fixable but is annoying when you have to fix that in others' code, esp since this code works fine when displaying figures normally.
I do not care as much for how it is displayed in the live editor itself. There is not much space there and I am ok with awkward proportions there. But when I export it (to markdown or html), even with run=1 to rerun everything, the exported figures are not any better. Like, the issue is eg that sometimes only part of the figure window is displayed. Sometimes the proportions inside the figures are weird as things are not scaled proportionally. Sometimes I rerun the live script and older plots appear (like, from code I deleted or changed several minutes ago). Things are displayed differently if I run the full script vs if I go section by section. Figures appear different sizes even though I set the position parameter the same. It just seems totally random.
I have tried setting the figure positions with eg set(groot, 'DefaultFigurePosition', [0 0 1722 955]). I have tried `Run=1, FigureResolution=600` in the export parameters.
I spent 1 full day trying to figure out if I am doing something wrong. I just want for figures to be exported properly, as if I plot everything outside of livescript and run exportgraphics on it. I just want exporting the live script to put that figure to the right place in the resulting script. Right now I just made a script that just runs the script normally and saves all opened figures in the place of the figures that the export function exports.
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.
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