Vertical Line plot - change properties together

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Hi matlab comunity, I have a plot with 100 lines (using line command). Now, I want to change the color, line style and line width of all these 100 lines at once.
How I usually do this is by clicking on "Show plot tools and Dock Figure" and getting the "Plot Borwser" from the "Desktop" menu and selecting the line I want and change it in the "Property Editor". Really fast and easy. Only problem is that the 100 lines are being taken as individual plots instead of one entity. So now I need select it 100 times and do it.
Example code given below.
x=[10:10:200]; plot(sin(x),'b','LineWidth',2); hold on %plot data
SP = [1:2.5:20]'; %points to draw vertical line
yL = get(gca,'YLim'); line([SP SP],yL,'Color','k','LineWidth',0.5); %vertical line
legend('Data plot','vertical lines');
Is there a way I can select all vertical lines at once? (only vertical lines. not my data plot) Or can I change it in the command window AFTER I already plot it? (This is for a plot I already have. Don't have the data to re-plot)
Thanks

Accepted Answer

Chad Greene
Chad Greene on 25 Mar 2014
Okay, this is somewhat clunky, but here it is. For the example you give in your original question, follow it with this line:
h = get(gca,'children');
Now you have handles of everything that's plotted on the current axes, and they're all in the variable called h. It looks like h(1) through h(8) are your vertical lines and h(9) is your plot data. so to change the properties of your vertical lines, try
set(h(1:8),'linewidth',5,'color','g')
  1 Comment
Mech Princess
Mech Princess on 25 Mar 2014
Thanks. That works :) So basically, h(1:8) can be changed to h(1:16) if I have 16 lines (i.e. SP = [1:2.5:40]';)

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More Answers (2)

Chad Greene
Chad Greene on 25 Mar 2014
When you plot the line, assign a handle to it like this:
h = line([SP SP],yL,'Color','k','LineWidth',0.5);
Then you can change its properties by
set(h,'color','m','linewidth',5)
  1 Comment
Mech Princess
Mech Princess on 25 Mar 2014
Thanks. This is perfect for all future plots.
Any possibility for the one I have already plotted? (I dont have data point to re-plot figure)

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Jean De Dieu Nshimiyimana
Edited: Jean De Dieu Nshimiyimana on 7 Oct 2021
Chad Greene , thank you very much for the super work! This helps me a lot:)
  1 Comment
Steven Lord
Steven Lord on 7 Oct 2021
In the time since 2014 we introduced a function that you can use instead of calling plot or line with constant X data: xline.
x = 0:360;
y = sind(x);
h = plot(x, y, '-');
xline(0:90:360, 'r:')
There's also an option to change where the X axis line is drawn that may be useful.
ax = ancestor(h, 'axes'); % Get the axes containing the plot
ax.XAxisLocation = 'origin';
box off

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