When I type in ~ on my laptop (FN + ALT + 126) the cursor jumps and misplaces the tilde

So far I checked 3 different laptops and I observe a rather annoyng behaviour on the last MATLAB release (also on R2010b?).

R2011a WIN32 Vista

A   = rand(10,1);
idx = A > .5;
A(~idx)

When I position the cursor on the last idx to type the ~, after I press the FN + ALT + 126 the cursor automatically jumps to the first idx, then when I release the combination of keywords it places the tilde!

I tried to play with the shortcuts to find the conflict but didn't come up with a solution.

Is this a bug? [No]

EDIT

On QWERTY keyboards with no ~ (see italian keyboards), otherwise I would just use that.

EDIT Addressing Walter questions:

• No matching idx to jump to: then it jumps before the |(|
• idx further away: irrelevant
• idxification: here comes the fun. Apparently it's the same as if the first bullet point BUT it interacts with A. If there's a preceding line starting with A but the first one, it jumps right before it. If the A appears only in the creation of the index, then again we are in the first bullet case BUT if no A appears in that line, then it DOESN'T jump.
• idx.blentish: same behavior as previous bullet
• Emacs was already turned off.

Other fun:

• if I add operators as *+/- it jumps right before the last inline operator (no preference which one is the last)
• Adding parenthesis make it jumps before the left outmost

[Walter Roberson]

For clarification: FN+ALT+126 is the way on MS Windows to enter the character whose decimal sequence number is 126, which corresponds to ~ . Note all country-specific QWERTY keyboards have the ~ character.

Oleg, what happens if there is no matching "idx" to jump to? What happens if the "idx" is further away? What happens if the previous "idx" is part of a longer substring, such as "idxificiation" ? Or "tridx" ? What happens if there is a longer string such as idx.blentish -- does it try to match everything up to the ')' or everything up to certain tokens such as comma ? What happens if you turn off emacs-style searching in the preferences (if that can be done) ?

[Walter Roberson]

Ugg, you're reminding me why I have been very slow to replace my Windows PC!

Answer 1

[Oleg Komarov]

If you have:

• Windows OS
• MATLAB 2010b or earlier
• Laptops that do not have a ~ (tilde) on the keyboard (see Italian QWERTY).

The technical support suggested two solutions to insert the tilde:

1. In File > Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts assign different combinations to "Go To Next Underline or Higlight" and "Go To Previous Underline or Higlight". I used respectively ALT+PAGE DOWN and ALT+PAGE UP.
2. Enable the numerical pad before using ALT+126. In my case: FN+BLOC NUM > ALT+126 > FN+BLOC NUM.