How do I customize a figure toolbar by removing certain buttons?

I would like to customize the MATLAB figure window by having the ability to remove certain buttons from the figure toolbar. For instance, I do not want my figure windows to have a "Save Figure" button.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

For releases prior to MATLAB 7.0 (R14) refer to the Related Solution listed at the bottom of the page.

For MATLAB 7.0 (R14) and all subsequent releases:

The following code will help illustrate how this can be achieved.

% If I want to disable the Save Figure button on the toolbar

figure

a = findall(gcf)

b = findall(a,'ToolTipString','Save Figure')

set(b,'Visible','Off')

FIGURE generates an empty figure window.

FINDALL gets a list of all graphics objects in the current figure window and assigns it to the variable “a”

Note that as you move your mouse across the various figure toolbar buttons, a yellow colored ToolTipString shows up indicating what each figure toolbar button does. This ToolTipString will be used to customize the figure toolbar by removing certain buttons. In the code above, we execute a second FINDALL command to find all objects assigned to the variable “a” that have the ToolTipString "Save Figure", and assign that to the variable “b”

SET sets all instances of Save Figure that are returned to “b” as OFF. These instances are no longer visible resulting in the "Save Figure" button no longer showing up in the figure toolbar.

It is extremely important that you spell the ToolTipString correctly and just as it appears when you move your mouse over a figure toolbar button. A list of ToolTipString (s) available in MATLAB 7.0.4 (R14SP2) are included below as a reference:

uipushtool buttons

(1) Show Plot Tools

(2) Hide Plot Tools

(3) Print Figure

(4) Save Figure

(5) Open File

(6) New Figure

uitoggletool buttons

(1) Insert Legend

(2) Insert Colorbar

(3) Data Cursor

(4) Rotate 3D

(5) Pan

(6) Zoom Out

(7) Zoom In

(8) Edit Plot

[Adam]

Is there really still no better way to do this 10 years later? I know the figure toolbar has been removed by default, but judging from the response to that a huge number of us bring it back for our figures.

In GUIDE we can easily create a toolbar with just a selection of the toolbar options, keeping their default behaviour. Surely there must be a programmatic equivalent of this that doesn't involve individually hiding 10+ buttons (and when I tried I ended up with a rogue separator in front of my remaining buttons) via the extremely brittle approach of identifying each one by its tooltip string?!

I would have liked to have a figure with just simple zoom and pan toolbar buttons, without having to program their functionality myself in a callback.

In the end I resorted to just allowing the new default axes exploration toolbar, but this is a vastly inferior offering.

[Tobias Averbeck]

You can use set(f, 'MenuBar', 'none') and set(f, 'ToolBar', 'none')

[Adam]

Then you end up with no toolbar at all!

[Anthony Herdman]

b = findall(a,'ToolTipString','Save Figure')
delete(b)

This willl remove the toolbar menu button 'Save Figure' and will respace the menu items so that there are no more space as compared to using the "Hide" option. I don't believe that you can get the toolbar buttons back that you have deleted.

[Nicolas Pipard]

Thanks @Tobias Averbeck

That definitly helped me. If my toolbar is not needed later, it's a very nice approach. Here is what I did with your suggestion to improve the speed of ginput:

Get subplot number from Ginputc the same way than Ginput (answer with faster Ginput)

Answer 2

[Scott Nuccio]

Baiscally, you can use the 'allchild' command to retrieve the toolbar handle. You can use it again on the toolbar to get all of the pushbuttons, etc. and then set their properties as you see fit.

hFigChildren=allchild(gcf); % retrieve all hidden children
hToolbarChildren=allchild(hFigChildren(end)); % retrieve all hidden children of the toolbar
hToolbarChildren(13).Visible='off'; % hide the 'Save Figure' pushtool

Now that you can see whats there, you can use the 'findall' function to streamline this if you know exactly what you want, and to prevent things from moving around since the example code is hard coded based on the order that the children are retrieved, and will change if things get added to the figure.

Also, if you want to add buttons. My script for adding buttons to the toolbar is called 'figToolbarFix.m' and lives in my 'user -> documents -> matlab' folder

function [] = figToolbarFix(hFig)
%UNTITLED2 Summary of this function goes here
%   Customize the default figure toolbar
%   hFig = handle of figure to be customized
%
%   Example: figToolbarFix(gcf);
%   Example: hFig=figure; figToolbarFix(hFig);

% enable the old 'zoom', 'rotation', 'pan', 'data tips', etc., buttons 
addToolbarExplorationButtons(hFig)

% load a pretty images to use for our buttons. Check MATLAB\release\toolbox\matlab\icons for other options, or
% make your own. Note the double conversion (rgb -> ind -> rgb) to normalize a png image.
[img1,map1] = rgb2ind(imread(fullfile(matlabroot,...
    'toolbox','matlab','icons','tool_plottools_show.png')),32);
[img2,map2] = imread(fullfile(matlabroot,...
    'toolbox','matlab','icons','pageicon.gif'));

% Convert image from indexed to truecolor (want true color RGB with values of 0 to 1)
icon1 = ind2rgb(img1,map1);
icon2 = ind2rgb(img2,map2);

% Get hiddenhandle of the toolbar we want to append to. By default the 'Figure Toolbar' is the only one active
% and should be listed last assuming a new, blank figure. Use 'figure; allchild(gcf)' to show all children
hToolbar=findall(gcf, 'type', 'uitoolbar'); %hToolbar=allchild(hFig); hToolbar=hToolbar(end);

%% for Seperate property editor and plot browser buttons
% % Add a new uipushtool to the end of the toolbar.
% uipushtool(hToolbar,'CData',icon1,...
%     'TooltipString','Property Editor',...
%     'ClickedCallback','propertyeditor',...
%     'Separator','on',...
%     'HandleVisibility','off');
% 
% % Add a new uipushtool to the end of the toolbar.
% uipushtool(hToolbar,'CData',icon2,...
%     'TooltipString','Plot Browser',...
%     'ClickedCallback','plotbrowser',...
%     'Separator','off',...
%     'HandleVisibility','off');

%% for a single toggle that opens/closes the previous state of the plot tools (use view menu to show/hide plot/browser/editor)
uitoggletool(hToolbar,'CData',icon1,...
    'TooltipString','Property Editor',...
    'OnCallBack','plottools(''on'')',...
    'OffCallBack','plottools(''off'')',...
    'Separator','on',...
    'HandleVisibility','off');

end

Take and go forth!!

Also see for more info and customizations:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/develop-apps-programmatically.html

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

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

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

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

Good Luck