Under Edit → Preferences, the preferences for the user interface regarding indentation, fonts, and syntax highlighting can be edited.

Figure 27.16. MATE Preferences

Default Indentation

Sets Tab Size (for TAB) and Indent Size (for automatic indents).

Auto-Indentation Options

Select Tab key always auto-indents to use the TAB key to auto-indent a selection.

Select Auto-indent on paste to automatically indent the pasted text.

Visual Options

Select a Color Scheme from “Automatic”, “Light”, or “Dark”. A restart of MATE is required after changing this option.

Select Show line numbers to show line numbers in the editor.

Select Show graphical scrollbar to show a scroll area with an approximated text display in the edit area instead of the usual vertical scrollbar.

Select Enable line wrap to enable wrapping of lines too long to display. This option can be set individually for other document types.

Select Show spaces as dots to display spaces in the edited files as dots.

Set the color of the dots with Dots Color.

Select Use spellchecker to enable spell checking in .mhelp, CSS, HTML, and XML files.

Document Options

Select Automatically save documents to automatically save open documents periodically.

Select Silently reload changed files to automatically and silently reload changed files.

Select Keep closed documents in sessions to keep documents on closing in the currently active session. Otherwise, a document will be removed from the session on closing the document.

Select Load last session on startup to load the last active session and its files on starting MATE. The session files are being loaded lazily.

Select Close all secondary windows with Escape to close secondary windows by pressing ESC. Secondary windows include the error check view window, the results windows for “Find in Files”, and the “Debug Output”.

Connected MeVisLab Options

Select Disable automatic module creation to disable the creation of a module when starting to edit module files (.def, .script, .py).

Select Show messages from all MeVisLab instances to display messages written to the debug output console of all running MeVisLab instances in the debug output console of MATE. If not selected, only messages from non-application, non-background instances will be shown.

Under the links MDL, Python, JavaScript, and Module Help, the tab, indent sizes, and line wrap behavior for each language can be set. This will override the general settings.

Select Use internal HTML preview in the Module Help preferences to tell MATE to open generated module help documents in an internal HTML view instead of the system web browser.