Can I change the prompt in MATLAB?

Question

I never work with the GUI and am always inside a terminal (also full screen, so no title bar) set with the -nodesktop -nodisplay option. I also have different servers that I

Answer 1

There is a submission on the MathWorks File Exchange that can do this for you: setPrompt by Yair Altman. Using it in R2010b, I noticed that I was getting the warning message:

Warning: Possible deprecated use of set on a Java callback. 
> In setPrompt at 115

Which I was able to suppress using the warning function like so:

warning('off','MATLAB:hg:JavaSetHGProperty');

And here's how I changed the prompt to the host name using the system function:

>> [~,systemString] = system('hostname');
>> setPrompt([deblank(systemString) '>> ']);
P11-4504>>

The function deblank is used to remove trailing whitespace (in this case a newline) from the string.

NOTE: The above changes (suppressed warning and modified prompt) don't persist after you quit and restart MATLAB, so you could put the above code in your startup.m file to apply them automatically every time you start a new session.