How to keep editor scrollbar from selecting text?

I installed R2023a on a new mac, and now this very annoying new behavior: if I grab the scrollbar to drag up or down the script, it selects all the text between start and end scrolling points. This can't be intended, how to stop it?

Answers (1)

You might have enabled "Scroll Selection", to disable it, follow these steps:
  1. Go to the "Home" tab in the MATLAB toolbar.
  2. Click on "Preferences" to open the Preferences dialog.
  3. In the Preferences dialog, select "Editor/Debugger" from the left-hand side panel.
  4. Under the "Editor" section, click on "Scrolling" to expand the options.
  5. Uncheck the box next to "Scroll Selection" to disable this feature.
  6. Click "Apply" and then "OK" to save the changes and close the Preferences dialog.

5 Comments

Hi, thanks but the panel doesn't quite resemble what you de3scribe, and I find only one option mentioning scroll (an option in Display to enable "Scroll/zoom", which is not enabled).
Are you looking at Mac/PC version? Could it be somewhere else I am missing?
I have the same problem, and likewise @Vishnu's comment didn't work for me.
Oh Hey, I think I solved it a couple of months ago, though I forgot about my comment here.
In my case, I changed a setting in the OS "Appearance" tab, i.e. not a Matlab but a Mac setting. "Show scroll bars" was set to "When scrolling" - I changed it to "Always" and this fixed this scroll-select problem. I just double-checked it.
This is what the preferences section looks like on MATLAB R2023a for MacOS:
As you can see, the Editor section of Editor/Debugger has no "Scrolling" or "Scroll Selection"
The Windows R2023a preferences are the same, just with slightly different decorations.
I do not recall there ever having been a "Scroll Selection" preference.
I think you used an AI system to answer, without checking the validity of the answer yourself.

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R2023a

Asked:

on 11 Jul 2023

Edited:

on 21 Aug 2025

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