Question

Suppose I’m using the MATLAB IDE and happen to have some very large objects in my workspace (e.g. arrays of 500k+ elements). Now, suppose that I stupidly and accidentally double click on one of these very large variables, which triggers a load to the array editor. Unfortunately, with arrays this big, MATLAB just hangs.

I’ve tried CTRL+C, CTRL+BREAK, CTRL+D, but none seem able to interrupt the behavior of the IDE. I know I can force matlab to quit, but reading all of those variables into the workspace in the first place takes a lot of time, and I may have unsaved changes in an editor window, etc.

Answer 1

I found a way, but it’s not the best, it requires a change of path and back once to get a handle to the original openvar

function openvar(name,array)
    persistent org_openvar
    if isempty(org_openvar)
        curdir=pwd;
        cd(fullfile(matlabroot,'toolbox/matlab/codetools'));
        org_openvar = @openvar;
        cd(curdir);
    end

    if numel(array)>1e5
        if strcmp(questdlg(sprintf('Opening ''%s'' which has %d elements.\n\nAre you sure? This is gonna take a while!',name,numel(array)), ...
        'Variable editor','Yes','Cancel','Cancel') , 'Yes')
                org_openvar(name,array)
            end
    else
        org_openvar(name,array)
    end
end

getting that handle is the biggest problem, calling it is just fine. If openvar would be built in, you could use the function builtin:

builtin('openvar',name,array)

but this is unfortunately not the case 🙁
str2func in combination with the complete path also doesn’t work, at least I don’t get it to work…