Matlab 2012b restore original menus and remove ribbon?

We have recently upgraded to matlab 2012b and horrified - can't find any menu items! Have spent 20 minutes fiddling with the ribbon but still unable to find the undo/redo button.

Please could you tell me how to restore the menus? I know it must be possible because it reappears when I enter a figure window!

Thanks Sanjay

[Randolph Crawford]

Sanjay, I agree with your assessment. As I see it we have the following choices:

1) Mount a PR campaign to make Mathworks aware of the folly of embracing self immolative fads like Win 7's ribbon. Or we could just wait until the Matlab Win 8 GUI comes out and all hell breaks loose...

2) Switch to a different Matlab development platform where ribbons and other GUI fads are less invasive, like Macintosh or Linux.

3) Regress to an older version of Matlab (pre-2012b).

4) Drop Matlab and switch to a different tool. Has Mathematica also been cut to ribbons?

[Andrew Janke]

Mac is a no go. I just installed R2014a on Mac and it has a ribbon too.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

You can't go back to the old menus of R2012a and before. The undo button is in toolstrip in the far upper right of the screen. It's the U-turn arrow icon.

[Sanjay Manohar]

Thanks for the prompt answer. But I think this is absolutely ridiculous - isn't upgrading supposed to be backwards compatible? Perhaps someone can tell me:

1. I used to press ALT+W to see the list of files I'm editing, and then use 'A' / 'B' / 'C' to navigate to the file I want. How can this be done in the new version?
2. I used to press ALT+F,A to do file-save-as, to quickly duplicate a file. How can I do this?

It seems that

1. several of my shortcut keys have gone, so I have to re-learn a new set
2. things that could previously be done with one click now take up to three clicks: previously to do "save as", I could hold the mouse down on "File", drag to "Save as", then release the mouse. Now I have to click on editor, then press on the small arrow under save, then drag to save-as.
3. May I also point out that the top-right corner is a ridiculous place to put the undo button - when you know that everyone is going to look for it under "Edit".
4. So, Paste is up there on the top right, but where is "paste to workspace"?

Did you actually have any users that suggested that a ribbon would be better than a menu? Are you 100% sure there is no way to restore the menu? I find this very hard to believe and hard to chew. The menu bar appears when I'm in a figure. Surely the developer didn't delete the code? Perhaps it can be re-enabled using Java commands? I can even create a menu bar myself at the top of the frame, using Java commands!

Ironically I think this whole ribbon business needs an UNDO or a U-turn. Sorry for all the questions, and I know it's not your fault, but I'm quite angry!

[Walter Roberson]

Image Analyst does not work for Mathworks, and is himself not thrilled about the changes. When he says you cannot go back, he is conveying what Mathworks has said in response to questions about how to do that. The other matters should be taken up with Mathworks (who has said they did test and people found the new version to be better.)

There have been some discussions about the new R2012b interface. See (in no particular order)

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/48428-too-late-to-submit-negative-feedback-for-r2012b

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/48070-experiences-with-release-2012b

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/54203-how-can-i-disable-toolstrip-keybindings

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/51844-r2012b-custom-toolstrip-tab

http://www.mathworks.co.uk/matlabcentral/answers/51514-2012b-editor-missing-features-change-case

[Jan]

While discussing this in the forum is useful, sending an enhancement request to TMW has more likely any influence on the product development.

[Image Analyst]

Actually I'm okay with them. At first, when Microsoft introduced the new paradigm, I was like all the others - griping about how they moved things around and how some things are now totally different - but I got used to it. I suppose because I'm used to that new way of doing things, I was okay when MATLAB adopted that new style. Occasionally I do one-on-one user studies with them, and I do let them know of my preferences, but this style was not something I requested in advance.

[Alberto Belasti]

The Ribon is totally unuseful for professional Matlab users. It is annoying and generates an unacceptable waste of time. In my case I am already migrating part of my code to Octave and Python to reduce this waste of time as we are normally very busy and can't afford any type of waste of time. M.

[Jan]

@Alberto: While I agree that the ribbons have a low usability, I admit that I loose a handful of seconds per day only. When I work on a small monitor, I hide the ribbons using CmdWinTool('lean') and keyboard shortcuts for all important functions.

In opposite to this, the excellent documentation of Matlab saves minutes per day in average, as well as the 99.9% reliable compatibility between the releases. Well, the 0.1% hurts sometimes, but if I compare Python 2.7 and 3.4...

[Adam]

I hate change when it happens (pretty much universally!), but now I am so used to Matlab with ribbons I can't even remember what the versions of Matlab without ribbons are like. They don't affect my usage in any way really. Certainly if keyboard shortcuts change then that is not good (though I rarely use more than a handful of these), but that is independent of ribbons.

[Walter Roberson]

I hardly remember what it was like before.

Most of the extra screen real-estate can be collapsed down.

It is the nature of programs that user interfaces tend to bloat, as users tend to expect that more and more be done for them. Things like syntax coloring or real-time syntax checking take up CPU cycles but people pretty much demand them now.

There was a time when I had to be concerned about whether the "decoration" features of my editor (such as incremental search) were interfering with the performance of the computer significantly enough that I could not justify the improvement in my productivity compared to the needs of others. But you know, that time has been gone for over 30 years.

These days, if I am worried about whether my work in an editor is slowing the machine unjustly, then it is because I am trying to run enough large programs simultaneously that my system has had to swap out at least 3 gigabytes of virtual memory to disk and the swapping is bogging down my system. However, in such cases, it is not the editor that is most important: it is the performance and memory usage patterns of the math or symbolic libraries.