MATLAB for Visual Studio Code

This extension adds language support for MATLAB to Visual Studio Code.

Main features

Colorization

(imported from MathWorks TextMate grammar)

Snippets

(Translated from TextMate's snippets)

Code Checking

Uses mlint for checking the MATLAB code for problems on save.

Usage

Install the extension in VS Code

• Open the command palette using Ctrl+Shift+P
• Type ext install Matlab in the command palette

Select MATLAB as a language

• On the bottom-right corner, click on the select language mode button, if you have created a new file it should display Plain Text
• Select MATLAB in the list of languages.

Alternatively, saving the file with a .m extension, will allow VS Code to understand that it is a MATLAB file, and automatically select the language correctly.

Using snippets

• Bring-up the autocomplete menu by hitting the Ctrl+Shift key combination
• Select the snippet that you want to use in the list
• Use tab to navigate through the snippet's variables

Setting-up linter

• Open the User Settings by going to File>Preferences>User Settings

• On the right pane, where you have the settings.json file open, add to the json file.

  "matlab.mlintpath" : "path to your mlint.exe file"

  For example, on a PC :

  "matlab.mlintpath": "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\MATLAB\\R2012a\\bin\\win32\\mlint.exe"

  And on a Mac :

  "matlab.mlintpath": "/Applications/MATLAB_R2016a.app/bin/maci64/mlint"

• Save your settings.json file

• Now, when you open a Matlab document (.m), VS Code displays warnings and errors.

  Remark: If you don't want the lint on save option and you want to remove the error message being displayed when the extension activates, change the matlab.lintOnSave option in the settings file to False.

Setting the linter configuration

By adding "matlab.linterConfig" : "path-to-linter-config-file" to your VSCode configuration file, you can pass a configuration file to the mlint call. Check Matlab's documentation to create this configuration file.

Setting the linter encoding

For some languages, like Chinese, the return of the linter is not using the default utf-8 encoding, but a different encoding (gb2312 for Chinese). If the linting doesn't show correctly, change the matlab.linterEncoding to the encoding used by your Windows console. For example, if your Windows is installed in Chinese, add "matlab.linterEncoding" : "gb2312" to your settings.json.

Changing the default file association

Visual Studio Code's default file association for .m files is Objective-C, if you want to set up the default file association to be Matlab go to the Users preference (File>Preferences>User Settings) and add the following line:

"files.associations": {"*.m": "matlab"}

Changing the default file encoding

MATLAB default file encoding is not utf-8, but Visual Studio Code is using utf-8 as default. The following setting specifies the default encoding for MATLAB files in Visual Studio Code:

"[matlab]": { "files.encoding": "windows1252" }