KeyPressFcn and WindowKeyPressFcn not working

I have a GUI (using the old figure, not uifigure). The figure has a KeyPressFcn to do some action.

So I have a pushbutton, and after clicking it I want to hide the button, so its callback turns off its visibility ('Visible', 'off').

When that happens, the KeyPressFcn (or WindowKeyPressFcn I also tried it) if the figure stops working. No matter what I do, I can't recover the focus.

So this is what I tried, and nothing worked, even with everything combined:

set(figHandle, 'CurrentObject', figHandle)
set(figHandle, 'CurrentObject', pushbuttonHandle)
figure(figHandle)
gco(figHandle)
gcf(figHandle)
figHandle.Visible = 'off'
figHandle.Visible = 'on'
drawnow

NOTHING WORKS.

Only way to make it work again is clicking the figure. But thats exactly what I DONT want to do. I must not click the figure after clicking the pushbutton, at least before the desired keypress.

However, if I enter debubg mode using breakpoints, then this works:

set(figHandle, 'CurrentObject', figHandle)
figure(figHandle)

But it does not work if not in debug mode. I don't understand this behaviour. I know removing visbility to objects have some strange side effects. But it should never remove permanently focus from a figure.

Why does it work in debugging mode, but not in normal mode?

Matlab R2020b

[Voss]

Rather than setting the pushbutton invisible in its callback, try setting its position to something outside the figure, e.g., [-10 -10 1 1], and see if that changes anything.

[André]

Its a possible option, maybe I will test it later.

I ended up using virtual mouse clicks using Java to recover the focus of the figure. I don't like such clumsy solutions, but thats the only way I figured out.