CODEWITHSUNDEEP
plotoctavefigure
BGreen
BGreen

Reputation: 450

Make Octave set a figure to be the active window (come to the "front of the screen")

When Octave draws a plot, I would like it to set that to be the active window automatically, so that it becomes visible and I don't have to click back and forth between windows to see if the code and plot have finished. Is this possible? Since it would require reaching outside of Octave and controlling the OS, I'm not sure; it depends on whether or not that capability is part of Octave but I haven't found a reference for it yet.

I can always tell Octave to close the figure before opening a new one in the code, but that could prevent me from drawing multiple plots on the same axes, and it would require me to code that command in every time. It would be nice if there were a direct way just to bring the plot to be visible and take dominance over other windows.

EDIT: Somehow, although I noted that Octave would be required to control the OS to achieve this, I completely forgot to mention what that was... I'm running Windows 10 with the default window manager; I believe that would be the Desktop Window Manager.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1707

Answers (1)

Tasos Papastylianou
Tasos Papastylianou

Reputation: 22215

When you plot something on a figure (whether you specify the figure you're plotting to within the plot command explicitly or simply let it plot into the currently active figure implicitly), this does not automatically raise the figure window to the forefront.

To do so, call the figure again using the figure function, along with the handle that you want to raise.

Alternatively, if you're sure that the figure you want to raise is the currently active one, you can simply use the shg command (which is effectively equivalent to figure(gcf))

E.g.

Fig1 = figure; % (or figure(1) if you want to be explicit)
Fig2 = figure; % (or figure(2) if you want to be explicit)

figure(Fig1); plot(1:10); % raise Fig1 to the forefront, and plot.

PS: Note that there was a bug affecting this behaviour until recently (coincidentally submitted by yours truly :p See https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45943 ). This is fixed in the latest version of octave though (i.e. 5.1.0)

Upvotes: 1

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