Opening uisetcolor extremely slow R2016b

Is anybody else having this issue? Has anybody found a workaround or solution?

I've tested 8 machines, and even asked a friend to try it on his system. 3 of the 9 were fine (roughly 1 second to fully open the color picker). The other 6 took about 15 seconds (certainly more than 10 seconds) to open. For my 8, all are running R2016b 64-bit with a mix of Win7 and Win10. I haven't found any distinction between the systems to indicate why the 3 have no problem.

[Adam]

Seems to open fast enough for me. I use my own colour picker now though since they changed it to a less useful one for R2016b.

Some UIs I have do take a long time to put together though - I don't know exactly what causes it. Maybe this one has components that take a long time on some machines, but not on others.

Answer 1

[Greg]

I found a workaround from a mildly-related question: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/307703-unwanted-changes-bugs-complaints-in-r2016b

Since everybody seems to prefer the old color picker, and it opens much faster than the new one, it's a great workaround.

setpref('Mathworks_uisetcolor','Version',1); RESTART MATLAB

Thanks to Jean Marie for the suggestion!

[Greg]

This solution no longer seems to work in R2017b. I have dug into some of the undocumented backend and found a new workaround.

s = settings;
oldcolorpicker = 'matlab.ui.internal.dialog.ColorChooser';
% For reference:
% newcolorpicker = 'matlab.ui.internal.dialog.WebColorChooser';
s.matlab.ui.dialog.uisetcolor.ControllerName.TemporaryValue = oldcolorpicker;

By setting oldcolorpicker as the .TemporaryValue property, the change does NOT persist across MATLAB sessions.

As undocumented functionality, this is not officially supported. Which means it could change without warning in any future release.

[Vince Clementi]

Hi Greg, thanks for posting this solution. Seems a lot of people are peeved about this change. I'm a relatively new MatLab user; when you say this does not persist across sessions, will I need to incorporate this code in each session I have?

Cheers.

[Greg]

Yes. The easiest method is put those lines of code in your startup.m file.

Answer 2

[Leo Simon]

Thanks Greg, wasted hours till I found your post. It's completely baffling why MATLAB would replace a perfectly good utility that loads instantaneously with an very inferior one that takes a few seconds to load, and not fix the problem till R2018b. I've been using matlab for decades and this is their worst screwup that I've experienced.