How can I open the interactive matplotlib window in IPython notebook

Question

I am using IPython with --pylab inline and would sometimes like to quickly switch to the interactive  zoomable matplotlib GUI for viewing plots  the one that pops up when you plot something in a terminal Python console   How could I do that  Preferably without leaving or restarting my notebook   The problem with inline plots in IPy notebook is that they are of a limited resolution and I can t zoom into them to see some smaller parts  With the maptlotlib GUI that starts from a terminal  I can select a rectangle of the graph that I want to zoom into and the axes adjust accordingly  I tried experimenting with   from matplotlib import interactive interactive True    and  interactive False    but that didn t do anything  I couldn t find any hint online either

User · Accepted Answer

According to the documentation  you should be able to switch back and forth like this   In  2    matplotlib inline  In  3   plot       In  4    matplotlib qt    wx  gtk  osx  tk  empty uses default In  5   plot         and that will pop up a regular plot window  a restart on the notebook may be necessary     I hope this helps

User · Answer

A better solution for your problem might be the Charts library  It enables you to use the excellent Highcharts javascript library to make beautiful and interactive plots  Highcharts uses the HTML svg tag so all your charts are actually vector images    Some features    Vector plots which you can download in  png   jpg and  svg formats so you will never run into resolution problems Interactive charts  zoom  slide  hover over points       Usable in an IPython notebook  Explore hundreds of data structures at the same time using the asynchronous plotting capabilities     Disclaimer  I m the developer of the library

User · Answer

I m using ipython in  jupyter QTConsole  from Anaconda at www continuum io downloads on 5 28 20117    Here s an example to flip back and forth between a separate window and an inline plot mode using ipython magic    gt  gt  gt  import matplotlib pyplot as plt    data to plot  gt  gt  gt  x1    x for x in range 20      Show in separate window  gt  gt  gt   matplotlib  gt  gt  gt  plt plot x1   gt  gt  gt  plt close       Show in console window  gt  gt  gt   matplotlib inline  gt  gt  gt  plt plot x1   gt  gt  gt  plt close       Show in separate window  gt  gt  gt   matplotlib  gt  gt  gt  plt plot x1   gt  gt  gt  plt close       Show in console window  gt  gt  gt   matplotlib inline  gt  gt  gt  plt plot x1   gt  gt  gt  plt close       Note  the  matplotlib magic above causes         plt plot         to implicitly include a         plt show     after the command       Not sure how to turn off this behavior   so that it matches behavior without using  matplotlib magic       but its ok for interactive work

User · Answer

If all you want to do is to switch from inline plots to interactive and back  so that you can pan zoom   it is better to use  matplotlib magic    interactive plotting in separate window  matplotlib qt    and back to html   normal charts inside notebooks  matplotlib inline     pylab magic imports a bunch of other things and may even result in a conflict  It does  from pylab import      You also can use new notebook backend  added in matplotlib 1 4     interactive charts inside notebooks  matplotlib 1 4   matplotlib notebook    If you want to have more interactivity in your charts  you can look at mpld3 and bokeh  mpld3 is great  if you don t have ton s of data points  e g   lt 5k   and you want to use normal matplotlib syntax  but more interactivity  compared to  matplotlib notebook   Bokeh can handle lots of data  but you need to learn it s syntax as it is a separate library   Also you can check out pivottablejs  pip install pivottablejs   from pivottablejs import pivot ui pivot ui df    However cool interactive data exploration is  it can totally mess with reproducibility  It has happened to me  so I try to use it only at the very early stage and switch to pure inline matplotlib seaborn  once I got the feel for the data

User · Answer

You can use  matplotlib qt If you got the error ImportError  Failed to import any qt binding then install PyQt5 as  pip install PyQt5 and it works for me

User · Answer

Restart kernel and clear output  if not starting with new notebook   then run   matplotlib tk   For more info go to Plotting with matplotlib

User · Answer

Starting with matplotlib 1 4 0 there is now an an interactive backend for use in the notebook   matplotlib notebook   There are a few version of IPython  which do not have that alias registered  the fall back is    matplotlib nbagg   If that does not work update you IPython   To play with this  goto tmpnb org  and paste   matplotlib notebook  import pandas as pd import numpy as np import matplotlib  from matplotlib import pyplot as plt import seaborn as sns  ts   pd Series np random randn 1000   index pd date range  1 1 2000   periods 1000   ts   ts cumsum    df   pd DataFrame np random randn 1000  4   index ts index                    columns   A    B    C    D    df   df cumsum   df plot    plt legend loc  best         into a code cell  or just modify the existing python demo notebook

[python] How can I open the interactive matplotlib window in IPython notebook?

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