Disable auto-scrolling in command window

Question

A lot of the code that I write in Matlab has a very verbose output. As the program runs, information is printed to the command window, and with each new line, the window automatically scrolls to the bottom. This becomes a problem when I want to read some of the output more closely or scroll up to look at older output. I can scroll up, but only until a new line is printed, which is often less than a second.

Does anyone know if it is possible to turn off this automatic scrolling in the Matlab window? I work in a number of different Matlab versions, depending on the machine, and this happens with all of them. The answer to this might be "No", but I swear I remember having this functionality at one point.

Answer 1

Use the more function: http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/more.html

more on

Then run your program. Press spacebar when you wish to see more of the output.

more off will turn it off.

Answer 2

You may find this workaround useful.

First launch matlab using the command line matlab -logfile 'myLog.txt' (the doc says it "starts MATLAB and makes a copy of any output to the Command Window in filename. This includes all crash reports.")

Then open your .txt file using a text editor supporting automatic refresh of content (see picture). On OSX I use TextWrangler (freely available at www) but others have been reported to have this feature (see here or here).

Results: output displays (fprintf, disp, but not the commands per se) are printed both on the Matlab console and the text editor (file is refreshed with a little lag time, below half a second I would say with my configuration). And there is no automatic scrolling. Such procedure does not seem to impact the overall performance of the script (although it may deserve some testing).