Controlling default location where figures are drawn

I find that whenever I create a sequence of figures, they are all drawn overlapped in the same location on the screen, so that I have to do a lot of clicking and dragging to view them. Is there a preference setting somewhere that can change this default behavior, e.g., so that when they are drawn, they appear before me spread out like a deck of cards across the desktop?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

The location that figures are placed at, when not placed specifically, is the coordinates

get(0,'DefaultFigurePosition')

with units get(0,'DefaultFigureUnits') . (For R2014b or later, it is better to use groot instead of 0 in these commands, so for example get(groot,'DefaultFigurePosition')

These values are fixed coordinates that do not take into account any other figure that might exist.

You might want to set the root DefaultFigureWindowStyle to 'docked' . This will get you tabbed plots instead of being all spread out.

You could also set the root DefaultFigureCreateFcn to the handle of a routine you create, and give that routine the responsibility of looking to see where existing figures are, and setting the Position to display elsewhere. Watch out for figures that are being positioned by program; you could probably detect them by noticing that their Position would not match the default Position.