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 po

Answer 1

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)