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.

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4. Javacomponent background color This article explains how to align Java component background color with a Matlab color....