Dear matplotlib developers,
I prefer to use matplotlib in my scripts without its state-machine
wrapper and it works mostly nicely. One thing which is missing
currently is a standard way to display a bunch of figures using the
default backend. What I have to do now is:
from matplotlib.pyplot import figure, show
f = figure()
ax = f.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.plot(range(10))
f = figure()
ax = f.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.plot([x*x for x in range(10)])
show()
What I don't like about this approach is that figure() not only creates
a figure instance, but also a hidden reference to it somewhere in the
state machine and show uses these hidden references. I find this
inelegant.
What about adding a function "show_figures" to matplotlib (not to
matplotlib.pyplot but somewhere else) which would show all the figures
in a sequence using the default backend? Then the following would be
possible:
f1 = Figure()
ax = f1.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.plot(range(10))
f2 = Figure()
ax = f2.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.plot([x*x for x in range(10)])
show_figures([f1, f2])
or even:
show_figures([Figure().add_subplot(1,1,1).plot(range(10)),
Figure().add_subplot(1,1,1).plot([x*x for x in range(10)])])