IPython Notebook widgets for Matplotlib interactivity

Question

I would like to use the ipython notebook widgets to add some degree of interactivity to inline matplotlib plots.

In general the plot can be quite heavy and I want to on

Answer 1

You can do this in a very strait forward way using the new(ish) notebook backend

%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from IPython.html.widgets import interactive

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(5))


vline = ax.axvline(1, color='k')
hline = ax.axhline(0.5, color='k')

def set_cursor(x, y):
    vline.set_xdata((x, x))
    hline.set_ydata((y, y))
    ax.figure.canvas.draw_idle()

and in a separate cell:

interactive(set_cursor, x=ax.get_xlim(), y=ax.get_ylim())

This will still re-draw the entire figure every time you move the cursor because notebook does not currently support blitting (which is being worked on https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/4290 )