Plot browser in R2025a?

in R2025a I can not find anymore the "plot browser" menu. I used a lot the hide/show options for lines.

Has this function disappeared?

Property Inspector is not really helpfull if many lines are present in the plot.

[Nigel]

It's been removed. We need this back. It's one of the most useful features for results analysis when overlaying multiple parameters in a time history. I'm also contacting my Matlab rep to make this request. I've also raised a service request, I suggest you do the same.

[Dave]

Agree that this is an exremly poor decision by Mathworks - the Property Editor features that supposedly replace the plot browser are clumsy, slow and unreliable.

This seems like a decision driven by some UI designer that doesn't actually use the tools they are designing for.

[Dave]

It also seems like the property editor feature that was well-organized and easy to use has been supplanted with the extremely clumsy and difficult to navigate property inspector.

My company has been encouraging us to consider alternative tools for plotting and data exploration (i.e. Python) and if Mathworks is going to be forcing me to relearn everything that is second nature to me just so they can have a fancy new UI I may as well do the relearning in Python instead.

[christopher]

This really is a terrible design choice!!

[Taras]

Completely agree. Designers of Property Inspector might have meant well, but they overlooked the fact that for the average user, simplicity by far trumps the abundance of features (most of which are either rarely needed or hide behind incomprehensible names). In addition, I did encounter a problem when trying to edit XTickLabels: the ones shown by Property Inspector were not the ones seen in the figure. Rather than calling Matlab's support (who usually are quite helpful), I found it easier to use Property Editor from my still installed R2021a version.

[Markus Leuthold]

The deprecation of plotbrowser() is indeed an issue, inspect() is not a replacement for an object browser. As part of a good interactive 3d camera orbit which also works for the new web based figures, I wrote a replacement for the old plotbrowser. Maybe it's of use for others as well

GitHub - githubkusi/Orbit3d: 3d orbiting camera control for Matlab uiaxes

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Indeed the plot browser is gone in R2025a. However, many of the features that were in plot browser have moved to the Property Inspector.

From the Format tab, select "Select & Plot Edit" and "More Properties" buttons (screen shot below). This will open the Property Inspector where you can drill down into your figure > axes from the top of the inspector. Once you have access to the axes children, you can right-click on the graphics objects to select show/hide.

Is there something you miss from the plot browser or can't find something in the property inspector? Contact tech support to submit an Enhancement Suggestion!

[Nigel]

Thanks Adam for responding,

I note when you want to magnify on a line, you have to deselect 'Select & Plot Edit', which closes the Property Inspector! You have two sets of plot control tools that can't be displayed / used in a coordinated manner. This is going to be very frustrating, including having to remove the plotbrowser from existing scripts.

I've raised Technical Support Case #07862809 which Jian Zhao of the support team has responded. If you wish I can put you on 'cc if it is of interest to you.

Best regards

Nigel

[Adam Danz]

Thanks Nigel, I'll keep an eye on it internally. As a general best practice, if you run into any tips that other MATLAB users may find handy, feel free to share them here.

[Nigel]

Noted, will do. Thanks Adam.

[Adolfo]

Thank you, Adam. However, following your directions the property inspector shows up, but it is empty. I don't mange to see the properties of the figure. Maybe because the figure was created with Matlab 2024a?

[Adolfo]

Solved! Shut down Matlab, opened it again, opened the figure and the property inspector was now populated.

Thank you again

[Andrew]

This method of hiding individual plots is really inefficient. For such a commonly used essential operation, it deserves to be made EASIER than the previous version, not more difficult.

[Mike D.]

It would be great if we could customize the toolbar to personalize what is needed the most and/or customize the context menu of right-clicking on an overlay curve while in edit mode. It would also be useful to have a hotkey that when pressed and held, it toggles on the edit mode, and then when unpressed toggles it off. Or vice-versa, a hotkey held down, toggles edit mode off, so that you can temporarily pan/zoom then unpress the hot key.

[Adam Danz]

Thanks for sharing those ideas @Mike D.

That reminded me; line objects, along with some other graphics objects, have a ContextMenu property that allows you to assign a context menu to the graphics object using uicontextmenu. That may be unrelated to the context menu in edit mode.

[Sylvain]

@Adam Danz Thanks. This latest release is absolutely awful for data exploration. simple tools like browsing plots, zoom in and out have been gradually removed. even using addToolbarExplorationButtons(gcf) is now a nightmare. the property inspector in this latest mode is hidden.

[Adam Danz]

Hi @Sylvain, I'm curious, what has been removed regarding zoom in/out? I'm not sure what that's referring to.

I'm also curious about your reasons to use addToolbarExplorationButtons and what about it is a nightmare.

The plot browser & property inspector issues are covered in my answer and comments above.

[Sylvain]

@Adam , Previously, couple of releases ago, we could have a zoom in/out and zoom to selection. it has been removed and you have to use addToolbarExplorationButtons(gcf) to display it again,

Yes you have some tools in the top right of the figure, but these are not great, depending on your mouse (and color blindness too), also, it is easy to select another tool than the zoom. e.g. data tip.

Now, when you activate the Property Inspector, this toolbar is not accessible. So it is a real hassle to explore data.

In previous release, there was a plot browser, wherr you could tick/untick the plot you wanted to display. This was very efficient. Now, it seems that couple of clicks to explore a figure takes ages, and even if you are aware where the tools are. It is not obvious to know where to click to display the property inspector for the figure (by default mine was folded)

As a note, the Inspect tab contains only the property editor. It would be very nice to restore all the tools and put them in this section.

Hope this makes semse to you.

[Adam Danz]

Thank for the details Sylvain. I understand your workflow now and how is been impacted.

[Jason]

@Adam Danz

Can you please provide more explicit instructions on how to get to the level of detail in your screenshot? The Property Inspector is so bad ... I can't even guess at how to get there.

Thanks

Jason

[Afiq Azaibi]

@Jason

There are a variety of ways to get to the Propery Inspector but here's one that's completely interactive once your data is in an axes

1. From the Figure's toolbar, select the "Format" tab.
2. Hit "Select & plot edit"
3. Double click on the axes or any of the lines in your axes.
4. The Property Inspector will appear on the right. To get to the view Adam describd, click the dropdown to the left of "Figure 1" depicted in the screenshot below

Now you can right click on the lines to bring up the context menu seen in Adam's screenshot.

[Jason]

Thanks @Afiq Azaibi!

Hopefully the fact that you had to circle the difference between a sold right triangle ▹ vs. a hollow triangle / greater than > symbol highlights the poor user interface choice made by MATLAB here. Despite my negative, I do again, appreciate the help/ picture!

[Bruno]

I’ve been using MATLAB for more than 25 years, and the Plot Browser has always been an essential tool for me — especially the ability to quickly click checkboxes to make lines visible or invisible in a crowded plot.

The Property Inspector is not an alternative. Yes, it can toggle the Visible property, but it requires so many clicks that in practice you simply won’t use it when dealing with tens of curves. The whole point of the Plot Browser was speed and usability.

Please, MathWorks: whatever it takes, make sure the Plot Browser (or an equivalent checkbox panel) comes back. It can’t be that difficult to implement, and it would restore a key workflow for many long-time users.

Answer 2

[Nigel]

This is the information I sent to Matlab for the Technical Support case:

The changes made make the workflow inefficient. With R2024B and prior, it was possible to manipulate the plot's pan, zoom and datatip tools as well as the visibility selections without needing to go into the menus. This provided a simple and elegant UI with minimal keyclicks preventing a break of concentration on the analysis being performed.

A trivial example:

The new changes don't allow for this. Opening the same trivial sample plot in R2025A with the property inspector opened it doesn't present the datatips, zoom and pan selections.

To get to these, you have to deselect 'Select & Plot Edit' which immediately removes the ability to control the visibility of a line.

To restore it, it requires two actions, one to reselect the 'Select & Plot Edit' and then the 'More Properties' before driving back through the Property Inspector selections to get return to the line's visibility selection.

Note also I have to also pin the top menu which then removes space that the actual plot could take.

When using these tools on a daily basis, this is unnecessarily irksome.

This was Matlab's response:

Thank you very much for providing the detailed explanation. We appreciate your feedback as it helps us continuously improve the product.

I have submitted this request to our development team, who will consider how best to address the inefficiency introduced by this change. I do apologise for the inconvenience caused by this.

Given the information above, I will close this case as "Request Submitted". The investigation from the Technical Support perspective is complete. However, from the Development perspective, the matter is still actively being investigated by MathWorks and will be considered for a future release / update. Should this be addressed, the status of the case will change to "Request Complete", and you will receive an automatic notification email from us.

However, if you have any further questions or concerns regarding this change, or if you come across any additional information, please do not hesitate to get back in touch, and I will be happy to assist further.

A recent request for an update has resulted in the following response:

The development team is aware of the request that I submitted on your behalf and will consider how best to address it. Unfortunately, I am not able to provide you with a timeline or details of the development team's investigation.

However, as I mentioned previously, should it be addressed, you will receive an automatic notification from us.

[Afiq Azaibi]

Hey @Nigel,

I have a workaround that might satisfy some of the missing functionality from the old Plot Browser:

p = plot(magic(5)); 
l = legend;
l.ItemHitFcn = @(h,evt)set(evt.Peer,'Visible',~evt.Peer.Visible);
% Click on the entries in the legend to toggle the peer object's visibility

Enabling this workaround will continue to let you have the default interactions but it doesn't provide the tick boxes from the Plot Browser so it's not as visually intuitive. It also doesn't provide other features the Plot Browser offered.

You can make this the default behavior for all your legend's if you call the following:

set(groot,'defaultLegendItemHitFcn',@(h,evt)set(evt.Peer,'Visible',~evt.Peer.Visible))

Can you let me know what you think of this workaround? I'm curious whether this satisfies your workflow and if it doesn't, in what ways it doesn't.

[Dave]

This is not a viable solution for my use-case, which often involves hundreds of individual line or scatter children on each Axes object. Attempting to implement this solution on one of my plots leads to this error message:

Warning: Limiting legend entries to 50. Specify a vector of graphics objects to display more than 50 entries.

The plot-browser worked very well for my use-case, here are some of the things it did well:

1. I could open it when I needed to see legend entries (populated with much informative detail on each trace), I could close it when I wanted to focus on the data.
2. Clicking on a particlar trace highlighted the corresponding legened entry so that I could see the informative details (useful for outlier exploration), this also worked for multiple traces
3. My scripts are set up to group traces in meaningful ways so I could select groups of rows in the property editor to hide/show them as I explored the data.

The new implementation in addition to reqiring a lot of extra mouse clicks is extremely buggy and slow. If I try to go in and hide a group of traces I often cannot even get the list of traces to show up in the property inspector. When I can get the list of traces to show up it is nearly impossible to quickly select some number of rows that I want to hide (or show).

It is alarming to me that Mathworks would choose to make such a large change to functionality as this seems to evelvate form above function and I cannot imagine that actual users of this long-available capability told you that they liked the replacement better than what we have had for a long time. I would expect a much stronger form-follows-function mentality from a company serving those of us trying to make sense of complex data.

[Afiq Azaibi]

Hey @Dave,

I'm sorry the Property Inspector isn't serving you as well as the Plot Browser at this time.

The reason you're getting that warning is because you're not specifying the objects you want represented in the legend. See the following:

p = plot(magic(100)); 
% If you don't specify p in the call to legend, you'll get the warning.
l = legend(p);

% Specify the number of columns to make all the entries appear on screen
l.NumColumns = 4;
l.ItemHitFcn = @(h,evt)set(evt.Peer,'Visible',~evt.Peer.Visible);

Again, you won't have all the functionality you had with the Plot Browser with this workaround but barring the numbered points, is there other functionality that the legend could provide that would satisfy your workflow?

Regarding your numbered points:

2) Regarding trace highlighting: Can you describe what additional information you were getting from the Plot Browser? A screenshot would be helpful.

3) Can you also show how you were selecting groups?

[Nigel]

Thanks Afiq for your proposal, but unfortunately work-arounds to resolve something that has been a basic operation for a while, particularly against the cost of our licences (as a business user) isn't acceptable. The main issue is that when we're analysing results, we don't want to have to break-out into a 'matlab' mindset. We really need to have the original functionality returned.

Best regards

Nigel

[Dave]

Wholeheartedly agree wtih @Nigel. Mathworks has chosen to downgrade their product and it seems likely under the advice of some UI designer that doesn't actually use the product. My company also pays a lot for the licenses from Mathworks, and paying for a product that is becoming less usable when free competing products are rapidly becoming more usable and powerful (i.e. the Python family of data science tools) doesn't make sense. If I am going to have to re-learn skills why wouldn't I choose to re-learn in a more competive toolkit?

[Dave]

Further.... I cannot get your suggestion to work in my code.

I am doing my plotting in a loop with one "Line" child of the axis created on each pass through the loop. Before the loop I create a figure and store a handle for it. I also create an axis and store a handle for it. Neither feeding the call to legend the figure handle nor the axis handle seems to work (former throws an error, latter seems to do nothing).

EDIT: Above comment was my mistake - I needed to insert the snippet you provided after the loop creating the line children, not above the loop where I create the axis and figure handles.

That said, the 4-coulumn layout creates a plot that is competely unusable where the legend takes up the entire plot window and there is just an unreadable sliver of a plot visibile.

[Dave]

Regarding your questions about my numberd points. Here are some examples from a dumbed-down version of my code (no real data here, just examples).

On (2) if I clicked on a line in the plot that line would automatically be highlighted in the plot browser window:

Since I popluate the legend entry with a lot of information about the conditions that lead to each line I can find out what paramters led to that line through visual exploration of the data.

on (3) I could just click and drag in the plot browser to select many different lines that I might like to turn off (or back on). It was also possible to Ctrl-click to select many non-contiguous rows.

Using the Plot Broswer along with the property editor I could also quicky change the properties of a line or group of lines that I wanted to focus on within the larger data set (for instance setting the line color, weight, line style or marker). This was extremely useful in visual exploration of the data. As far as I can tell the 2025a arrangement completely kills this functionality.

[Nigel]

One of the features about the original tool, was that because it was simple and intuitive, it made it possible to use it for technical discussions with people who aren't software engineers - again it allowed concentration on the subject and not on the tool. This is so important; being able to use it quickly and effectively maintains confidence with the customer particularly when trying to present results that aren't going to be easily understood and does allow them to do some simple interaction.

[Afiq Azaibi]

@Dave,

If you have the screen real estate, another optoin would be to set the Legend to be in one of its Outside Locations to make the figure very large. I understand that the workaround doesn't satisfy all the workflows you got from the Plot Browser and the workaround is more of a hoop to jump through when the functionality you wanted was in the Plot Browser all along.

I appreciate you providing the screenshots to illustrate your workflow in more detail. I'm sharing this feedback with my colleagues and we are working to address these pain points.

@Nigel

Thank you for your input as well. I'm sorry the workaround doesn't satisfy all your workflows either. We're using your feedback to inform future design decisions as well.

[Nigel]

Hi @Afiq Azaibi,

Please understand, the work-around is not a solution and ought not be promulgated within your organisation as such. I am coming to the Matlab Expo at Silverstone this year, if there's someone on your design team who will be there to go through this further then I am happy to liaise appropriately.

Best regards

Nigel

[Afiq Azaibi]

Hey @Nigel,

We're not treaitng the workaround as a solution to the pain points caused by the lack of Plot Browser. I wanted to suggest this legend workaround to see if it could partially bridge the gap but I hear you loud and clear that it does not. When functionality is not availble in our product, we try to do suggest workarounds as a temporary fix until the fucntionality is available.

I will follow-up with my colleagues about the expo at Silverstone.

[Nigel]

Hi @Afiq Azaibi,

Thank you for clarifying and for your attempts to aid us.

Best regards

Nigel

[Dave]

@Afiq Azaibi Sometimes I do have the screen real-estate but other times I am constrained to work on a laptop screen. The ability to open and close the plot browser helped a lot in the latter case.

Answer 3

[道明]

It's very difficult to use now, why abandon the previous version

It would be great if there were intuitive operations like Origin