Section color no longer an option in 2021b?

Prior to the changeover (versions 2021a and older), the current section in the Editor would be highlighted a yellowish color. Now with 2021b, there is a blue bar on the left to indicate the current section. I'd like the yellow-highlighted color back. Looking at the forum, there was an option in Preferences -> Colors -> Programming Tools that would allow the user to customize this section color, but unfortunately this has been removed. Or am I not seeing it somewhere?

[Ravinder Hans]

It is disappointing that this feature is no longer available! I was so used to it and it helped to focus on a section of code during development. Please bring it back!

[Marcel]

@MathWorks Support Team

I was checking out the 2022a pre-release, and found that there is still no option to highlight the current code section. Can you please address this user request before launching the official 2022a.

[David Rosenbaum]

Much appreciated, folks. That will help and I (we) appreciate your responsiveness ... Two more suggestions for MATLAB: (1) Provide a feature whereby all the section headers (distinguishing strings after %%) are shown as a kind of table of contents in the program and not just in the Publish version; (2) Allow for subsections down to some arbitrary number of levels as in standard hierarchicies.

[Miguel Ángel Ortiz Salazar]

I'm seriously considering going back to the 2020b version because of this. The yellow background on the current section helped a lot.

[Simeon Yurek]

Is it possible to turn off the section highlight/blue line feature in 2021b while still keeping section breaks? Thanks!

[Marcel]

I like to address another problem of a non-highlighted section @MathWorks Support Team:

It is not possible to see where the line start, where is character 1. The current editor looks like there are 3-4 free space before the first letter, so the entire line looks intended, even if it's not. With the (yellow) highlight in the picutre below from 2021a it was clearly visibly where the first character of this line is.

MATLAB 2021b

MATLAB 2021a

[Ian Townend]

I have just migrated from 2020b to 2022a. All I can see on my screen to denote the current section are two horizontal blue lines. The side bar blue strip is so thin it is almost invisible. I will try adapting but may well revert to using 2020b for editing. As already stated there is a high degree of subjectivity in the statement that this change has improved the appearane. For me the ability to clearly identify the current section with a pale colored background was one of the strengths of the Matlab editor.

[Shyam Kishor Sharma]

Yes, Recently I updated my version from 2018 to 2022a , and there is no option for yellow color in section after %% sign .I used to that features .Please bring back the previous display settings.

Thanks.

[Naor]

+1 that request, and also requesting the option to remove the horizontal line between sections.

Sections are valuable to me in functions (as opposed to scripts or live scripts) as a way to visually organize code, perhaps like paragraphs or chapters in prose. A subtle visuale distinction between sections is very helpful, while a strong visual distinction is more distracting than helpful.

[Jakub Matousek]

Please give it back.

[Liang Hu]

Please give this option back I am so used to it. Have to downgrade to 2021a after upgrading to 2022a. It is just a waste of time.

[Martin Brand]

I would also greatly appreciate to have the yellow highlighting back, please!

[Michael Drew]

+1 vote from me. This is a horrible "improvement"! Please bring back the old formatting as an option.

[André A]

I also agree the highlight should be back. And also an option to change the color if this blue line, because it is awkward in my dark background.

[Matthew McMahon]

+1 for the suggestion to change it back. I, too, much prefer the yellow highlight.

[Xingwang Yong]

Improved appearance? The default color scheme in R2022a is already a mess. Not to mention the missing section highlight, which can not be adjusted anymore.

[Adam Golinski]

Please bring back the yellow highlight! It was much more eye-friendly before.

[Nicolae Moise]

Can you please bring back the old section highlights, at least as an option in the preferences?

[Christopher Koh]

I would like to chime in here, and request that MATLAB brings back the old section highlights.

Or at the very least, allow the end-user to choose their own "improved appearance" options, instead of MATLAB unilaterally deciding what constitutes an "improved appearance".

Here's to R2021a instead of R2023.

[Christopher Koh]

Mathworks.

This "improved appearance" of removing section highlights is actually an order of magnitude worse. In fact, I will be on record and say that Matlab R2021a has a BETTER APPEARANCE than R2021b because it has section highlights.

This degradation in appearance is also making me actively look for a better editor than MATLAB's in-built editor, or perhaps use another language. Perhaps I should get ChatGPT to code me an editor that has section highlights. Just a thought.

[tutku oztel]

so frustrating how hard it is atm to navigate across the sections with the current default </3 i was barely paying attention to what we have at the lefthand side of the coding window until now. bad decisions... hated it

[Krzysztof Stopka]

Please bring back the yellow highlight!

[Mike Brennan]

Please bring back the yellow highlight!

[Schuvol]

Please bring back the yellow highlight!

[Brian Keane]

Yes, please bring it back.

[Konstantinos Chiotis]

Indeed, the yellow highlight was much more eye-friendly!

[Christopher Koh]

Can I request another improved appearance, to have a section highlight option once again?

[shengzhi]

R2024a still no section highlight

[Brian Keane]

I ask that you please bring back the section highlight from 2021a. As a person who professionally studies visual perception, I can say that color-coded sectioning provides a powerful and intuitive way to discern where you are in the script, and where one section ends and the other begins. At the very least, it should be offered as an option that can be toggled on or off.

[Mingjian]

Still no section highlighting in R2024b. But there is now a "Highlight current line" option, so clearly there is no technical barrier in optionally rendering text background color. Imo highlighting current section is much more ergonomic than highlighting a single line, since it makes sense to read up and down from a single line to understand a code section. Highlighting a single line may unnecessarily attract human attention to the single line, hindering contextual understanding of the whole section. I turned it off immediately after opening the new MATLAB installation.

Answer 1

[Arthi Sathyamurthi]

Hi,

Starting in R2021b, sections in the Editor have an improve appearance. The new section is highlighted with a blue border, indicating that it is selected. Hence, "section display option" to highlight section is not available in R2021b.

For more information refer to R2021b Release Notes (Environment --> Editor Sections).

[Cory Dinkle]

Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, "improved appearance" is subjective, and having this as an option instead of forced change would have been appreciated. It may look nice, but it detracts from an efficient workflow.

[Marcel]

@Arthi Sathyamurthi why does the Blue bar on the left side sometimes not appear?

It seems that the section bar is not available, if a .m file is a function instead of a script?

Personally I agree with @Cory Dinkle, that "improved appearance" is very subjetive and I feel a big downside on the new layout...

[Vineeth Karuppasamy]

I agree with @Cory Dinkle, The said improved appearance is subjective, I would prefer the yellow background and sad that there are no preference options to bring it back in 2021a/b.

[Alexander Burky]

I also agree with @Cory Dinkle, please bring back the ability to customize the section background color!

[David Rosenbaum]

I agree as well. It is now much harder to see sections, and my programming efficiency and happiness have both dropped precipitously. It would have been no skin off the noses of the Mathworks to still let us color section backgrounds via Preferences ... Don't take away functionality. Very frustrating... Mathworks should issue an immediate new release to restore this capability.

[Özkan Gül]

I definitely agree with David.

Removing current cell highlighting decreased my efficiency and productivity.

With current section highlighting, I was more focused, more efficient and more productive.

Please bring back current cell highlighting.

Regards.

[Anton Iatcenko]

I strongly agree with the comments above. This highlighting was one of the reasons I was using sections in my code to begin with, and it really help me focus on the part of the code I was currently working on. It also made it easier on the eyes when I was working for londer periods. The blue bar on the side is more of a distraction than help for me.

Please bring back the highlighting as an option in future releases. Meanwhile, I am going to roll back to 2021a.

[Bálint Dr. Magyar]

Usually I give a few weeks to get used to new things, but this color removal is still a huge problem to me, I cannot get used to it, it was a stupid idea (I bet it is not coming from an engineer) to remove the old coloring without the option to turn it back...

[Piotr Kluczek]

I strongly agree with Anton and David. It is surprising how much it changes the UX, but it does.

Please make it at least an option.

Regards.

[Konstantinos Bakoulas]

Please make this an option. I normally don't use any kind of highlighting for sections. This blue thing is loading the UI needlessly. Plus it makes the vertical bar with the line numbers thicker, taking away valuabe screen area. Until it is fixed I will be switching to an older version, thank you.

[Jim Svensson]

Completely wrong. I have been using Matlab for 15+ years and this is not "improve appearance". I hate it when software reaches the point where they start to make it more "visually pleasing" at the expense of usufullness. But typically it happens with every sucessful software.

[Jonathan Mansell]

I agree with all the comments above, fair enough to add a new way of displaying, but to remove the old option completely is infuriating. I much prefer the older method of displaying different sections of code.

Dissapointed Matlab...

[Paul Hoffrichter]

@Arthi Sathyamurthi

I have a short script and get a blue bar. It calls a function in a separate file. This function has many sections in it. But there is no blue bar (and no coloring as in previous versions). This file also has a number of other functions (not nested), and no blue bars in them either.

What do I have to do to get a blue bar? The blue bar is better than nothing. (But please bring back the color - even if I have a vertical blue bar, I do not want to use it because I value screen real estate highly, and need every 1/4 inch.

---

Update: I created a new file with a function, and added sections and got a blue bar.

How do I get my existing files to show blue bar?

Why not remove the blue bar and just leave in the coloring and save the vertical real estate?

[Paul Hoffrichter]

I agree with @Cory Dinkle

I also do not like losing a 1/4 inch (6.35 mm) of vertical real estate. Remove the blue bar and just bring back the coloring.

Did one user complain about the coloring to cause MathWorks to invest in this idea?

Did MathWorks submit this prototype to their users and got a strong "Yes, this is great!" ??

[Andrew Marshall]

Yes. I would also like the yellow-ish highlighted cell mode to return. I don't like the current default.

[Veronica Taurino]

I agree with the previous too. Let it as an option please

[Stefanie Schwarz]

It is by design that the blue bar on the left side does not appear for functions or classes.

The rationale we had for it is during the internal pilots for the new editor, a number of users commented on the width of the left line number margin being too large when compared to the old R2021a editor so when working in functions or classes we chose to hide certain elements of the margin that weren't as used or useful in those types of files like the run section margin.

We are open to possibly revisiting this behavior in the future if more users comment on it.

[Bob]

In MATLAB, I exclusively program with only functions and classes. I find scripts limiting because they junk up the base workspace with variables. If I want to work with these variables at the command line, I simply use breakpoints to enter the debugger. So, this new design restriction on section highlighting artificially limits the section highlighting capability for me.

I vastly prefer the old style in which the background is highlighted in a color to the new blue bar. One way that I enjoyed using section highlighting was to help visually break up multiple local functions and nested functions within a single m-file. In fact, for GUIs with more than a handful of controls, I would say this highlighting capability is almost critical for me. If the old style was brought back to the Editor, or added as a new feature for the use case that I described, it would be greatly appreciated!

(Also, where is the capability in the MATLAB Editor to group multiple files under projects whose contents can be collapsed and expanded? I develop code for multiple tasks, and this feature would enormously aid in helping to organize my work. I have been waiting over 20 years for this capability to be added to the Editor...)

[Zhaoran Zhang]

Yeah, I also like the yellow backgroud much better. I think the yellow helps me to focus on the current section better and give me more peace. I've been working with the same yellow background for years, feeling sad to not have it anymore.

[Till Temmen]

I agree with all the previous responses. The yellowish highlighting is really good and makes structuring and coding so much easier. Please bring it back

[Joe_Z]

Agree with all comments, this is awful. In general the blue / grey lines cutting across sections make determining where sections start / end impossible. This is a complete pain and am very suprised no options were provide to reinstate legacy behavior and/or turn off these section border lines.

(In general though, I think the IDE in 2021 is a great improvement!)

[Richard]

Agreed. I think the yellow background that I had R2021a is great.... now I'm on R2022a I'm ticked off its gone.

[José Miguel Sanz Alcaine]

Agree with above comments. This should be optional.

[Reza Mir]

I'm adding my vote for the old style of highlighting sections. This new appearance for the section with the blue bar is much harder to see and has negatively affected my programming. The old scheme allowed you to focus on the section. Please bring back the old style with an option in settings.

[buschman]

I'm also liking the old appearance and see no advantage in the "improved" appearance to me. Pls turn it back or make it an option.

[Les Beckham]

Another vote for allowing the previous appearance as an option (at the very least).

There are lots of things about this "new" editor that qualify as serious regressions, especially this and the fact that there is no way to enter "overwrite" mode. See here: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/1607985-toggle-insert-overwrite-mode-not-working-in-editor?s_tid=ta_ans_results#answer_857290

[Austin Pavlas]

One more vote for bringing back the previous appearance. My team had planned on upgrading to 2022a, but have decided to stay on 2021a due to this change.

[lihiniya]

Yes, please bring back section highlighting (background color change to yellow). Also the sections are no longer seperated for functions. Only scripts have the blue section bar on left.

Also the new edittor does not mark lines with code (with a short stroke left of editor window). It's difficult to put breakpoints in the new editor because of this.

[JS2018]

Yeah, bringing it back as an option would hurt no one and benefit many.

At the very least, please give us the option to have the blue bar for functions/classes/etc.

[Adam Gardner]

This is a terrible idea. Will not update to new versions. Considering not using matlab altogether with these types of decisions!

[Jacobus Duijnhouwer]

also not happy. The lines are ugly and i liked the colored section background

[Duijnhouwer]

I think the reason so many people are unhappy with the new look of sections is that they, like I, did not use it as cells that can be executed independently as in Jupyter and Mathematica notebooks, but as a way to organize their comments nicer.

I love that the font on the line that starts with %% is in bold face. It allows me to give a hierarchy to comments. I had the lines turned off and set the backgroud of each cell/section to an almost subliminal light blue just to indicate the scope of the logical section. The section functionality that Mathworks seems to want to copy from Mathematica/Jupyter doesn't really make sense in matlab functions anyway, and it only works as indicated in Arthi Sathyamurthi screenshot above in Matlab scripts (which i never write).

Solution: give us another commenting option to provide what i describe above, a way to make a comment bold-face and hightlight with color (adustable) until the next such comment. Without the cell-execution functionality (never use it). Perhaps %# or %*? And while you're at, why not add %_ or %/ for italic fonts to allow even clarity in comments?

[Steven Lord]

I love that the font on the line that starts with %% is in bold face. It allows me to give a hierarchy to comments.

FYI you can change the text (not comments in code sections) in the Live Editor into different heading levels. MATLAB Answers has similar functionality, though it only offers "Heading" rather than "Heading 1", "Heading 2", and "Heading 3" as is available in the Live Editor. In Answers click the icon to the left of the B icon in the Text section of the Toolstrip. As an example:

Here is a heading!

In the Live Editor select the Live Editor tab and click the icon "normal" in the Text section of that tab to change the heading level. These headings are reflected by different indentation levels in the Table of Contents (which you can add to your Live Script via the Insert tab.)

[Michal Szkup]

Removing highlighting can hardly be described as an improvement. If some users found highlighting not useful then adding options to switch it on or off would be preferrable.

In general, the fewer changes there are to UI the better as switching costs are real.

[John Brewer]

"Starting in R2021b, sections in the Editor have an improve appearance."

What if nobody thinks this is "an improve appearance"? I think comment point to problem.

[Xiaohao Sun]

Can you guys add this highlight feature back, or at least allow the users to switch this on? Many thanks!

[seif seif]

Please revert that, it is so annoying when one keeps eye-balling on the screen to identify what active section they are in.

[Chet Sharma]

100% agree. If I wanted it to look like the Jupyter Notebook...I'd use Python, not Matlab! Please bring the yellow shading option back...makes it so much easier to trace code.

[Benjamin Bratton]

I greatly prefer the older "yellow highlighting". I agree with others that it is acceptable to be an option instead of default. I use section/cell mode both for logically organizing comments and for executing/troubleshooting code blocks. This change negatively and significantly impacted my productivity.

[Jonathan Davami]

I also agree it should be an option. I almost want to go back to MALTLAB 2020 just becuase it is much easier to see each section with them higlighted all one color rather than a skinny blue bar.

[Jack Supple]

Reverted to 2021a, surprised I had such a strong opinion about this... New appearance is grim

[Min Zhang]

I see many people like me prefer this color highlight feature :).

[Dana Massie]

The Editor does NOT have "an improve appearance". The blue bar is not an improvement. This is a regression and a mistake.

[Walter Nagy]

Absolutely agree, this is a terrible change to the editor. I feel many of these "GUI designers/engineers" apparently do not have color vision since they no longer want us color seeing humans from doing our job for effectively. This is a major step back and is the reason why I have not upgraded to the "improved" editor.

[Thomas Hoffend]

The "improved appearance" is not improved. It makes it more difficult to track/follow sections.

This is a "fix" to something that was not broken.

[Mengnan Wu]

^^^

[Dana Massie]

This is not an "improve" appearance. It is a regression.

[AAA]

Agree with above.

That is not an improvement, an improvement would be if one can choose the prefered option.

For my part I prefer the yellow highlighting.

[Eric]

Agree with the general feeling of comments here - please bring back the yellow highlights for sections of code. The blue bar is definitely NOT an "improvement" as claimed, and makes identification of different code sections a lot less intuitive.

This is particularly a problem when scripts or functions are passed to a colleague for review, as frequently happens in my company. The poor old reviewer has a much more challenging job to see what's going on - and the whole thing just looks less structured and...er...very poor in my humble opinion.

As many have said, you don't need to sacrifice the "improved" interface with the blue bar; just add the backward-compatibility for yellow highlighting as an option. Those who love the blue bar will be fine with the editor right out-of-the-box, whereas those of us who found the yellow highlighting helpful can re-instate it with a tick-box in "preferences" or similar.

[Walter Nagy]

This is an improvement like when Apple removed the colors in the finder sidebar - this has been a sore issue for years now. It still sucks that this very useful highlighted section feature is gone since color is something some of us humans use to bring attention to a section or item quickly - probably why it was added in the first place :-). The blue bar is utterly lame and nearly useless. FYI, I didn't know it existed until I read it on this site since my desktop background is nearly the same blue color, ROFL. Why do you remove features/options instead of just providing the option to be enabled or disabled?

[ANGELICA LIPONI]

Hi, I agree with the sentiments expressed in the comments above (if not all, then certainly the vast majority). Having the ability to highlight the current section in the Editor by using a different background color would be greatly appreciated. It truly aids in visualizing the start and end of a section, which I find extremely helpful. I hope this option could be reinstated in the upcoming releases.

Additionally, as someone else has already pointed out (here), it's currently challenging to discern the starting point of the text within a line due to the presence of a left margin. Consequently, it's unclear if there's any indentation present. Thank you!

[Ivan Kirschner]

I vastly prefer the old yellow section highlighting for functions, scripts, or any other form. It does not take up any space at all. Like Bob, I strictly use functions for programming in MATLAB, but I like the narrow line numbering width. PLEASE bring back the yellow section highlighting!!!!!!

Answer 2

[Paul Hoffrichter]

When I called MathWorks about coloring of the call stack lines (above the current function) when stepping through the r2021b debugger, the agent checked and saw another similar complaint. They fixed this problem in r2022a but did not fix it for r2021b.

If they get many complaints on the technical support line, maybe they will add the yellow color section background. So call!

Technical Support: 508-647-7000 Access to technical support requires a valid license number and a Software Maintenance Service subscription.

Enter ver to get the license number.

Not sure how this works for students. However, they are acutely aware that students become their future customers, so call and find out how to complain about their bad feature.

When calling be very specific about this one missing yellow background issue. Don't combine multiple issues in one call.

Answer 3

[Alan Peters]

The blue line thing is not only a worse indicator of the current selection but it is also, to put it nicely, an annoyance. If I accidently click on it the section runs. That is actually more than an annoyance because it completely disrupts my flow. That makes me angry in a time when I do not need one more source of anger. Some people may like the new live blue line. But I most decidedly do not. Please make it an option so I can get rid of it!

[Amy]

Alan, if you right click in any part of the left margin, you can unselect "Show Run Section Margin". This preference will take effect in all open editors and in all future MATLAB sessions and is available in R2021b and later releases. This is documented on the page Create and Run Sections in Code.

[Alan Peters]

Thank you very much, Amy! That does solve my problem -- accidently clicking on the blue line causes the whole script to run when I did not want it to and thereby dissrupted my work flow. Now I'm back to where I was and that is good.

I do wonder why, when introducing a GUI element that supplants a current one, the current one is not kept as an option. I understand that it some cases that is not possible. But having either a blue line next to, or a yellow highlight over the current section seems rather a trivial option to implement. I have been using matlab for 35 years(! Time flies.) first on Sun Workstations, later on windoze PCs. The changes in the program over that time have been dramatic, amazing, and largely very welcome. One that threw me was when the keyboard shortcuts changed from the unix/vi set to a windows set. But I soon found that the previous set still worked, it just had to be installed. No problem at all! I still install those with every new release and continue on. So Mathworks knows how to provide alternatives. I am surprised that the yellow highlight was not retained as an option. Perhaps an unintended oversight?