I am having problems trying to make matplotlib plot a function without blocking execution.
I have tried using show(block=False) as some people suggest, but all I get is a frozen window. If I simply call show(), the result is plotted properly but execution is blocked until the window is closed. From other threads I've read, I suspect that whether show(block=False) works or not depends on the backend. Is this correct? My backend is Qt4Agg. Could you have a look at my code and tell me if you see something wrong? Here is my code.
from math import *
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
print(plt.get_backend())
def main():
x = range(-50, 51, 1)
for pow in range(1,5): # plot x^1, x^2, ..., x^4
y = [Xi**pow for Xi in x]
print(y)
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.draw()
#plt.show() #this plots correctly, but blocks execution.
plt.show(block=False) #this creates an empty frozen window.
_ = raw_input("Press [enter] to continue.")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
PS. I forgot to say that I would like to update the existing window every time I plot something, instead of creating a new one.
I spent a long time looking for solutions, and found this answer.
It looks like, in order to get what you (and I) want, you need the combination of plt.ion(), plt.show() (not with block=False) and, most importantly, plt.pause(.001) (or whatever time you want). The pause is needed because the GUI events happen while the main code is sleeping, including drawing. It's possible that this is implemented by picking up time from a sleeping thread, so maybe IDEs mess with that—I don't know.
Here's an implementation that works for me on python 3.5:
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
def main():
plt.axis([-50,50,0,10000])
plt.ion()
plt.show()
x = np.arange(-50, 51)
for pow in range(1,5): # plot x^1, x^2, ..., x^4
y = [Xi**pow for Xi in x]
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.001)
input("Press [enter] to continue.")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
A simple trick that works for me is the following:
Use the block = False argument inside show: plt.show(block = False)
Use another plt.show() at the end of the .py script.
Example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.imshow(add_something)
plt.xlabel("x")
plt.ylabel("y")
plt.show(block=False)
#more code here (e.g. do calculations and use print to see them on the screen
plt.show()
Note: plt.show() is the last line of my script.
You can avoid blocking execution by writing the plot to an array, then displaying the array in a different thread. Here is an example of generating and displaying plots simultaneously using pf.screen from pyformulas 0.2.8:
import pyformulas as pf
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import time
fig = plt.figure()
canvas = np.zeros((480,640))
screen = pf.screen(canvas, 'Sinusoid')
start = time.time()
while True:
now = time.time() - start
x = np.linspace(now-2, now, 100)
y = np.sin(2*np.pi*x) + np.sin(3*np.pi*x)
plt.xlim(now-2,now+1)
plt.ylim(-3,3)
plt.plot(x, y, c='black')
# If we haven't already shown or saved the plot, then we need to draw the figure first...
fig.canvas.draw()
image = np.fromstring(fig.canvas.tostring_rgb(), dtype=np.uint8, sep='')
image = image.reshape(fig.canvas.get_width_height()[::-1] + (3,))
screen.update(image)
#screen.close()
Result:
Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer for pyformulas.
Reference: Matplotlib: save plot to numpy array
Live Plotting
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 100)
# plt.axis([x[0], x[-1], -1, 1]) # disable autoscaling
for point in x:
plt.plot(point, np.sin(2 * point), '.', color='b')
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.01)
# plt.clf() # clear the current figure
if the amount of data is too much you can lower the update rate with a simple counter
cnt += 1
if (cnt == 10): # update plot each 10 points
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.01)
cnt = 0
Holding Plot after Program Exit
This was my actual problem that couldn't find satisfactory answer for, I wanted plotting that didn't close after the script was finished (like MATLAB),
If you think about it, after the script is finished, the program is terminated and there is no logical way to hold the plot this way, so there are two options
block the script from exiting (that's plt.show() and not what I want)
run the plot on a separate thread (too complicated)
this wasn't satisfactory for me so I found another solution outside of the box
SaveToFile and View in external viewer
For this the saving and viewing should be both fast and the viewer shouldn't lock the file and should update the content automatically
Selecting Format for Saving
vector based formats are both small and fast
SVG is good but coudn't find good viewer for it except the web browser which by default needs manual refresh
PDF can support vector formats and there are lightweight viewers which support live updating
Fast Lightweight Viewer with Live Update
For PDF there are several good options
On Windows I use SumatraPDF which is free, fast and light (only uses 1.8MB RAM for my case)
On Linux there are several options such as Evince (GNOME) and Ocular (KDE)
Sample Code & Results
Sample code for outputing plot to a file
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, 100)
y = np.sin(2 * x)
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.savefig("fig.pdf")
after first run, open the output file in one of the viewers mentioned above and enjoy.
Here is a screenshot of VSCode alongside SumatraPDF, also the process is fast enough to get semi-live update rate (I can get near 10Hz on my setup just use time.sleep() between intervals)
A lot of these answers are super inflated and from what I can find, the answer isn't all that difficult to understand.
You can use plt.ion() if you want, but I found using plt.draw() just as effective
For my specific project I'm plotting images, but you can use plot() or scatter() or whatever instead of figimage(), it doesn't matter.
plt.figimage(image_to_show)
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.001)
Or
fig = plt.figure()
...
fig.figimage(image_to_show)
fig.canvas.draw()
plt.pause(0.001)
If you're using an actual figure.
I used #krs013, and #Default Picture's answers to figure this out
Hopefully this saves someone from having launch every single figure on a separate thread, or from having to read these novels just to figure this out
I figured out that the plt.pause(0.001) command is the only thing needed and nothing else.
plt.show() and plt.draw() are unnecessary and / or blocking in one way or the other. So here is a code that draws and updates a figure and keeps going. Essentially plt.pause(0.001) seems to be the closest equivalent to matlab's drawnow.
Unfortunately those plots will not be interactive (they freeze), except you insert an input() command, but then the code will stop.
The documentation of the plt.pause(interval) command states:
If there is an active figure, it will be updated and displayed before the pause......
This can be used for crude animation.
and this is pretty much exactly what we want. Try this code:
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
x = np.arange(0, 51) # x coordinates
for z in range(10, 50):
y = np.power(x, z/10) # y coordinates of plot for animation
plt.cla() # delete previous plot
plt.axis([-50, 50, 0, 10000]) # set axis limits, to avoid rescaling
plt.plot(x, y) # generate new plot
plt.pause(0.1) # pause 0.1 sec, to force a plot redraw
Iggy's answer was the easiest for me to follow, but I got the following error when doing a subsequent subplot command that was not there when I was just doing show:
MatplotlibDeprecationWarning: Adding an axes using the same arguments
as a previous axes currently reuses the earlier instance. In a future
version, a new instance will always be created and returned.
Meanwhile, this warning can be suppressed, and the future behavior
ensured, by passing a unique label to each axes instance.
In order to avoid this error, it helps to close (or clear) the plot after the user hits enter.
Here's the code that worked for me:
def plt_show():
'''Text-blocking version of plt.show()
Use this instead of plt.show()'''
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.001)
input("Press enter to continue...")
plt.close()
The Python package drawnow allows to update a plot in real time in a non blocking way.
It also works with a webcam and OpenCV for example to plot measures for each frame.
See the original post.
Substitute the backend of matplotlib can solve my problem.
Write the bellow command before import matplotlib.pyplot as plt.
Substitute backend command should run first.
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')
My answer come from Pycharm does not show plot
I have plotted an interactive figure, run the cell, and now all my keyboard presses are being captured by the interactive plot. How do I exist this without the mouse?
Shift-enter sort of works, but it seems to require there be a cell below the plot.
I think matplotlib recommends ctrl-w but as I am in a web browser (Jupyter) that would just close my tab.
The plot is within the cell.
%matplotlib notebook
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig,ax = plt.subplots(1,1)
x = np.linspace(0, 1, 100)
y = np.random.random(size=(100, 1))
ax.plot(x, y)
If you run this, you can't then use j,k to move up and down cells until you exit the interactive plot.
This is just a code snippet, in the actual code I am updating the plot from within a loop which is why I'm using interactive mode.
You can add another short-key to close the plot. This can be accomplished via the rcParams.
So let's say you want to close the plot by pressing q.
%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams["keymap.quit"] = "ctrl+w", "cmd+w", "q"
plt.plot([1,3,2])
Now pressing q will exit the interactive plot, such that you can navigate as usual through the notebook. E.g. to then get to the next cell, which would already be active, just press Enter.
Eventually you would probably want to change your matplotlib rc file with this option not to have to type it in every time you start a notebook.
i am using spyder to run the following script
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
ax=fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([2,1,3])
plt.ion()
plt.show()
input('something')
the problem is, that the matplotlib-window appears at the end of the script (after i entered 'something')
when i'm executing this script in a terminal the window appears and i can enter 'something' simultaneously - this is what i need.
does someone has an idea what causes this problem?
I am trying to plot in Jupyter notebook (Python 2.7), then prompt user for input, save it and then change the plot (this is a crucial point: I don't want to create a new plot, I need to modify the old one after user input). This completely fails to work. Instead of showing the figure and then prompting for input, it opens the figure window, but freezes (doesn't display anything) until I respond to the raw_input() prompt. Only then it plots.
Simple version of the code to show the error:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib qt
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1,2,3],[1,2,3])
plt.show(block=False)
my_input = raw_input()
This bug only appears when I use %matplotlib qt, but I have to use it, because with %matplotlib inline I am unable to modify the plot after it was displayed (at least as far as I am aware).
In fact, I noticed that it freezes until the end of the cell execution, even if it is just time.sleep().
Am I missing something? Some settings of how matplotlib displays figures?
Since I am using Python3 I had to change raw_input() to input() and removed the block=False because IPython told me that this is an unknown attribute.
This should work nice:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1,2,3], [1,2,3])
plt.show()
my_input = input()
Fur sure, you need to adapt this back to Python2 to fit your needs.
Is there a way to close a pyplot figure in OS X using the keyboard (as far as I can see you can only close it by clicking the window close button)?
I tried many key combinations like command-Q, command-W, and similar, but none of them appear to work on my system.
I also tried this code posted here:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(range(10))
def quit_figure(event):
if event.key == 'q':
plt.close(event.canvas.figure)
cid = plt.gcf().canvas.mpl_connect('key_press_event', quit_figure)
plt.show()
However, the above doesn't work on OS X either. I tried adding print statements to quit_figure, but it seems like it's never called.
I'm trying this on the latest public OS X, matplotlib version 1.1.1, and the standard Python that comes with OS X (2.7.3). Any ideas on how to fix this? It's very annoying to have to reach for the mouse every time.
This is definitely a bug in the default OS X backend used by pyplot. Adding the following two lines at the top of the file switches to a different backend that works for me, if this helps anyone else.
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TKAgg')
I got around this by replacing
plt.show()
with
plt.show(block=False)
input("Hit Enter To Close")
plt.close()
A hack at its best, but I hope that helps someone
use interactive mode:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Enable interactive mode:
plt.ion()
# Make your plot: No need to call plt.show() in interactive mode
plt.plot(range(10))
# Close the active plot:
plt.close()
# Plots can also be closed via plt.close('all') to close all open plots or
# plt.close(figure_name) for named figures.
Checkout the "What is interactive mode?" section in this documentation
Interactive mode can be turned off at any point with plt.ioff()
When you have focus in the matplotlib window, the official keyboard shortcut is ctrl-W by this:
http://matplotlib.org/1.2.1/users/navigation_toolbar.html
As this is a very un-Mac way to do things, it is actually cmd-W. Not so easy to guess, is it?
If you are using an interactive shell, you can also close the window programmatically. See:
When to use cla(), clf() or close() for clearing a plot in matplotlib?
So, if you use pylab or equivalent (everything in the same namespace), it is just close(fig). If you are loading the libraries manually, you need to take close from the right namespace, for example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot([0,1,2],[0,1,0],'r')
fig.show()
plt.close(fig)
The only catch here is that there is no such thing as fig.close even though one would expect. On the other hand, you can use plt.close('all') to regain your desktop.