Customizing figure toolbar background

In one of my projects, I needed to present a radar (polar) plot. Such plots are usually drawn on a black background and I wanted all the plot controls to blend into this background.

Matlab figure having black toolbar background

For the plot itself I used a variation of Matlab’s buggy polar function, which I modified to enable proper dynamic resize / zoom / pan, bypass figure-renderer issues with patches and data-cursors, and other similar annoyances. Pretty standard stuff.

For the slider I’ve used a javax.swing.JSlider having a continuous-movement callback. Again, for readers of this blog this is nothing special:

[jSlider,hSlider] = javacomponent('javax.swing.JSlider',[0,0,.01,0.1],hFig);
set(hSlider, 'Units','norm','pos',[.15,0,.7,.05]);
set(jSlider, 'Background',java.awt.Color.black, ...
             'Value',0, 'Maximum',duration, ...
             'StateChangedCallback',{@cbSlider,hFig,axPlayback});

Setting the background color for all the GUI components to black was easy. But setting the toolbar’s background to black turned out to be a bit more interesting, and is the topic of this week’s article.

Standard Matlab figure toolbar - yuck!

The first step, naturally, is to get the toolbar’s handle:

hToolbar = findall(hFig,'tag','FigureToolBar');

In my case, I programmatically create the figure and use the default figure toolbar, whose tag value is always ‘FigureToolBar’. If I had used a custom toolbar, I would naturally use the corresponding tag (for example, if you create a custom toolbar using GUIDE, then the tag name will probably be ‘toolbar1′ or something similar).

Since I’m setting the figure programmatically, I need to manually remove several unuseful toolbar controls. I do this by directly accessing the toolbar control handles:

delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Plottools.PlottoolsOn'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Plottools.PlottoolsOff'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Annotation.InsertColorbar'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','DataManager.Linking'))
delete(findall(hToolbar,'tag','Standard.EditPlot'))

For setting the bgcolor, we get the toolbar’s underlying Java component, then sprinkle some Java magic power:

% ensure the toolbar is visible onscreen
drawnow;
 
% Get the underlying JToolBar component
jToolbar = get(get(hToolbar,'JavaContainer'),'ComponentPeer');
 
% Set the bgcolor to black
color = java.awt.Color.black;
jToolbar.setBackground(color);
jToolbar.getParent.getParent.setBackground(color);
 
% Remove the toolbar border, to blend into figure contents
jToolbar.setBorderPainted(false);
 
% Remove the separator line between toolbar and contents
jFrame = get(handle(hFig),'JavaFrame');
jFrame.showTopSeparator(false);

Unfortunately, this is not enough. The reason is that some of Matlab’s standard toolbar icons use non-opaque Java button controls (thereby showing the new black bgcolor), whereas other icons use opaque buttons, with a hard-coded gray background (I feel like spanking someone…). I’ve already touched upon this issue briefly a few years ago.

Matlab figure toolbar with black background, some opaque buttons

Luckily, all is not lost: we simply need to loop over all the JToolBar’s components and force them to be non-opaque with a black bgcolor. In cases where the component is compound (e.g., the Brush Data uisplittool), we need to set the bgcolor for all the sub-components:

jtbc = jToolbar.getComponents;
for idx=1:length(jtbc)
    jtbc(idx).setOpaque(false);
    jtbc(idx).setBackground(color);
    for childIdx = 1 : length(jtbc(idx).getComponents)
        jtbc(idx).getComponent(childIdx-1).setBackground(color);
    end
end

…finally ending up with the blended appearance that appears at the top of this article.

1. Customizing the standard figure toolbar, menubar The standard figure toolbar and menubar can easily be modified to include a list of recently-used files....
2. Figure toolbar components Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to access existing toolbar icons and how to add non-button toolbar components....
3. Figure toolbar customizations Matlab's toolbars can be customized using a combination of undocumented Matlab and Java hacks. This article describes how to customize the Matlab figure toolbar....
4. uicontrol side-effect: removing figure toolbar Matlab's built-in uicontrol function has a side-effect of removing the figure toolbar. This was undocumented until lately. This article describes the side-effect behavior and how to fix it....