In Matlab 2025a, how do I hide a plot trace

I often plot three or more traces on one plot, sometimes using both right and left axes. It is useful to be able to temporarily hide one or more traces, to inspect the remaining trace(s) more easily. With older versions of Matlab, I did this using the plot browser. How do I do it in Matlab 2025a?

[Mathieu NOE]

funny, I never used the plot browser ...

but I use since long time this excellent plot alternative from Paul Mennen : pltSig - File Exchange - MATLAB Central

fyi, his ancestor : plt - File Exchange - MATLAB Central

Answer 1

[Benjamin Kraus]

There are several options, but I think the closest to the plot browser is to use the Property Inspector:

1. Click on the "Format" tab.

2. Click on "Select & Plot Edit"

3. Click on "More Propertes"

4. Once the property inspector is open, show the tree at the top of the property inspector:

5. Now you can right-click on each line and choose to "Show" or "Hide" the line.

[Benjamin Kraus]

Another option, which requires a little more effort to setup, but works pretty nicely once it is setup, is to leverage the ItemHitFcn on the Legend. For more details on the ItemHitFcn, you can see the documentation for the property.

plot(magic(5))
legend(ItemHitFcn=@(~,e) set(e.Peer, Visible=~e.Peer.Visible))

This adds a callback that runs when you click on entries in the legend. The callback will set the visibility of the "Peer" to the opposite of the current visibility, basically allowing you to click on the legend to toggle line visibility on/off.

[Sven]

While it is nice that there are some workarounds, it is a shame that the plotbrowser option is not available anymore. We routinely generate figures with dozens of lines that are turned on/off for comparison. The plotbrowser provides checkboxes, allows to scroll through the list of lines. This is simply not possible with the alternatives. We hope that version 2024 will work for a long time, or that the plotbrowser comes back in a future matlab version.

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

If you want to show or hide plotted curves programmatically (say when a use checks or unchecks a checkbox on your GUI), you can get the handle to the plot and then set it's Visibility property. Here is a short demo:

hp1 = plot(rand(1, 20), 'b.-', 'MarkerSize', 25);
uiwait(msgbox('Click OK to create a second plot.'))
hold on;
hp2 = plot(rand(1, 20), 'r.-', 'LineWidth', 3);
% Programatically hide the first plot temporarily.
uiwait(msgbox('Click OK to have plot 1 disappear temporarily.'))
hp1.Visible = "off"
uiwait(msgbox('Click OK to have plot 1 appear again.'))
hp1.Visible = "on"