[IPython-dev] rant: "%matplotlib inline"

[Brian Blais]

I'll continue the rant, and perhaps add a bit of a suggestion.  I come
at this from an instructor of scientific methods, usually with
students with no programming or command line experience - typically
windows.  The arcane syntax (from a beginner's perspective) of
%matplotlib inline seems to just add confusion - even while I
understand the motivation.  In the past, it was easy enough to slap
the command line option in the shortcut once and be done with it.
asking the students to manually edit the IPython config files is a bit
much for them, and in windows who knows where it is.

One possible solution, which may work to solve this is to have a
(double-clickable) app to set some of the standard defaults, modifying
the config files programmatically.  that way, there is one easy set up
step after install and the problem is solved without resorting to
command-line arguments, manually editing the config files, or manually
importing the library in each and every notebook.

thanks,

Brian Blais


On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 8:30 PM, Matthias Bussonnier
<bussonniermatthias at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi William,
>
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
>> On Jul 2, 2015, at 17:16, William Stein <wstein at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> <Rant>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just want to register my frustration that by far the most common
>> support request I get about IPython use in SageMathCloud is the
>> following: "To display the plot, I'm tried to pl.show(), and also
>> pl.savefig('test.png') as suggested by some answers online, but
>> neither did the job. What is the correct command?"
>>
>> The answer is "%matplotlib inline", and there is a stackoverflow
>> question here about it:
>>
>>   http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19410042/how-to-make-ipython-notebook-inline-matplotlib-graphics
>>
>> I'm aware that disallowing the `--pylab inline` option when starting
>> ipython on the command line was a choice that you made on purpose.
>
> I just want to say that --pylab is deprecated, but --matplotlib still work.
> the only difference is that --matplotlib will just not do all the imports.
>
> The reason why $ipython notebook --pylab inline , or even $iptyhon notebook --matplotlib inline
> do not work [as expected] is that that these are kernel flags that are passed to the server. It didn’t make sens
> to pass them to the kernel as for that we needed to know what flag the kernel can receive. It special case
> before, but making ruby kernel crashing, or wondering why some flag would be passed, and some other not.
>
> So you **can** enable inline by default, you just need to set the default in a config file:
>
> IPKernelApp.matplotlib=<CaselessStrEnum>
>     Default: None
>     Choices: ['auto', 'gtk', 'gtk3', 'inline', 'nbagg', 'notebook', 'osx', 'qt', 'qt4', 'qt5', 'tk', 'wx']
>     Configure matplotlib for interactive use with the default matplotlib
>     backend.
>
> We did consider, and are still considering making inline the default, it just break some abstraction
> that the kernels need to know they are started from a notebook.
>
> Hope this will make you life (a bit) easier. You can also modify the kernel spec to add a --matplotlib inline to the argv
> it should  work.
>
>> No response required -- I'm just being a humble tech support person
>> watching out for users :-)
>>
>> </Rant>
>
> --
> M
>
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-----------------

             bblais at gmail.com
             http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais