Is there a reason that for the GTK backend gtk.DrawingArea was used instead of gtk.Layout? As far as I can tell gtk.Layout can do everything that gtk.DrawingArea can, but has the additional advantage that you can place widgets on the canvas, which can be extremely useful. I tried a quick patch (which I can send if anyone wants), where I got it working fine. The main changes (there aren't many) are where changes to the window would be make, 'self.window' needs to be replaced with 'self.bin_window', and I also found I had to connect to the 'size-allocate' event to have it properly redrawwhen the window size changed.
As a side note, one feature that this might allow, would be to allow for matplotlib-widgets to be drawn using the GTK if the backend were detected (much like how SWT, for Eclipse works).
Also, on a complete tanget, does anyone know of a good method of saving animations done in MPL? The only two methods that I can think of right now are to (1) interface with matlab, or (2) save each frame, and create an animated gif. As my movies are fairly large, neither seem like a great option.
After searching around some, I found pymedia, but when I try to import it, all it manages to do is crash. While a SWIG interface could be created for FFMPEG, it would be nice if there were some other option.
Thanks,
Abe