What Is the Live Editor?

Gabriel Ha, MathWorks

True to its name, this live demo showcases how Live Editor enables you to:

Work in a single environment and eliminate context switching; results and visualizations appear right next to the code that produced them.
Enhance your code and output with formatting, images, and hyperlinks to turn your live script into a story.
Create engaging lectures that combine explanatory text, mathematical equations, code, and results.
Share your live scripts directly with others so they can reproduce or expand on your work.
Generate static PDF, Word, HTML, and LaTeX files for viewing outside MATLAB^®.

MATLAB Live Editor provides a new way to work in MATLAB, giving you tools to tell a story with your code, and making it easier for you and anyone else to understand your work.

Live Editor lets you create a notebook which allows you to combine code with natural reading material like formatted text, images, and even LaTeX equations. There’s also much less of a disconnect between your code and its output. You can choose to put your results and visualizations right next to your code or view them inline. And in the same way that a new paragraph helps signal a new concept or theme, Sections enable you to tell your story with more clarity. They can also be run independently, so you can focus on one task at a time.

This interactive document is called a Live Script, and you can share it with anyone, even if they don’t have MATLAB. It can be published as a PDF, Word, HTML, or LaTeX document. If you’re sharing your work with other MATLAB users, Live Controls are a great tool for drawing attention to important parameters. Your audience can also leverage their own expertise to tweak those inputs and improve on your results.

Live Editor helps you write your story with more speed and more clarity. It provides you with contextual hints right below where you’re typing, so you can quickly locate variables or other options that make sense for what you’re writing. You can interact with your code results to explore further and provide clarity, and these interactive tools can automatically generate code to reproduce your adjustments. Live Editor Tasks help streamline the coding process for common workflows, like calculating thresholds for abrupt changes in data. You can easily tweak parameters, auto-preview their effects, and auto-generate the code that reproduces your findings.

Live Editor lets you combine code, results, and formatted text to tell a story about your work. Contextual hints, interactive outputs, and Live Editor Tasks help you code faster. And you can share your work with other MATLAB users, as well as people who don’t have MATLAB. Be sure to check out the links below to learn more about Live Editor and find examples to quickly get started.