Eshwar - you can create function callbacks for the mouse down and mouse up events (within a figure) and have them fire whenever the user presses or releases the button when the mouse pointer is within the figure. The following test function demonstrates this
function MouseButtonEvents
hFig = figure;
set(hFig,'WindowButtonDownFcn', @mouseDownCallback, ...
'WindowButtonUpFcn', @mouseUpCallback);
function mouseDownCallback(~,~)
fprintf('mouse button is down!\n');
end
function mouseUpCallback(~,~)
fprintf('mouse button is up!\n');
end
end
Save the above to a file named MouseButtonEvents.m and then run it to see how the different callbacks respond to the mouse button events.
From your question, you seem to want to "do something" so long as the mouse button is down. I suppose what you could do is create a periodic timer in the mouse button down callback and have it do that something so long as the button is down. The above code would become
function MouseButtonEvents
hFig = figure;
myTimer = timer('Name','MyMouseButtonTimer', ...
'Period',1.0, ...
'StartDelay',0.001, ...
'TasksToExecute',inf, ...
'ExecutionMode','fixedSpacing', ...
'TimerFcn',@timerCallback);
set(hFig,'WindowButtonDownFcn', @mouseDownCallback, ...
'WindowButtonUpFcn', @mouseUpCallback);
function mouseDownCallback(source,event)
fprintf('mouse button is down!\n');
start(myTimer);
end
function mouseUpCallback(source,event)
stop(myTimer);
fprintf('mouse button is up!\n');
end
function timerCallback(source,event)
fprintf(' mouse button is still down!\n');
end
end
We create a timer object that will fire every one second. Since we nest all of the callbacks within the MouseButtonEvents function, then each of the mouse button callbacks has access to the timer to either start or stop it.
