How to change tickmarks and their labels?

Q: How to change tickmarks and their labels?

Properties XTick, YTick, XTickLabel, YTickLabel of Axis object control tickmarks and their labels.

 plot(1:10);
 set(gca,'xtick',[1  5 10])
 set(gca,'xticklabel',char('zero','middle','end'))

By the way, the char function is used here to consolidate strings of different length into a single array.