Color of the moving bar in waitbar

Hello,

I would like to know how I could change the color of the moving bar in the object waitbar in Matlab 2019b and newer. I have tried something like h = waitbar(...) and then get a property of the object, but not successfully. Thank you in advance for any response.

Answer 1

[Anay]

Hi Lukas,

I understand that you are trying to change color of the progress-bar of the “waitbar” figure.

However, I did not find any inbuilt functionality to change the colour of the moving bar of the “waitbar”. But, I found that the workaround suggested in the following answer works to overcome this issue:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/293374-waitbar-color-2016a-is-broken-red-how-to-set-to-older-continuous-green#answer_227433

The solution mentioned in this thread requires setting “setStringPainted” member of the underlying java object to “true”. This means that the percentage of waiting done will appear as a string on the progress-bar. Alternatively, you can customize the appearance of the MATLAB "waitbar" figure by directly accessing and modifying the underlying Java Swing component. The "waitbar" contains a “javax.swing.JProgressBar” embedded within its “hgjavacomponent”. Once you obtain this component, you can adjust its appearance by setting various properties, such as foreground color. You may use the following code for refernce:

h = waitbar(0, 'message string'); 

javaComponent = findall(h, 'Type', 'hgjavacomponent');
 
if ~isempty(javaComponent)
    % Get the JProgressBar in the hierarchy
    progressBar = javaComponent.JavaPeer;

    % Chnage the progress bar color using UI customization
    if ~isempty(progressBar)
        % Create a custom UI delegate to change the color 
        ui = javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalProgressBarUI();
        progressBar.setUI(ui);

        % Set the progress bar color
        progressBar.setForeground(java.awt.Color(1, 0, 0)); % Set to red color
    else
        disp('JProgressBar not found.');
    end
end



% Driver code to visualize the waitbar
for i = 1:100
    pause(0.05); % Simulate some process
    waitbar(i/100, h, sprintf('Progress: %d%%', i));
end

% Close the waitbar
close(h);

I hope this helps!