Windows上的交互式matplotlib / ipython图形

Question

I'm having trouble getting matplotlib up and running on a recent Win7/Cygwin installation.

I've use the Cygwin package manager to install python 2.7.8, but the mirrors I have tried don't seem to include packages for ipython or matplotlib. I've used Cygwin to install the prerequisite packages

pkg-config ghostscript libfreetype-devel libpng-devel python-gtk2.0 libgtk2.0-devel gcc-g++ git

(a list I found here ) and installed both matplotlib and ipython from their git repositories:

git clone git://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.git
cd matplotlib
python setup.py install

cd ..

git clone https://github.com/ipython/ipython.git
cd ipython
python setup.py install

I can successfully plot from a standard python prompt by manually calling show() , or from an ipython session (started without --pylab ) also by manually calling show() . In both cases show() blocks the terminal input until the plot window is closed, and closing the figure resets it so that subsequent plotting commands begin with a blank canvas.

If I run ipython --pylab , or run pylab.ion() from within ipython, then plotting commands bring up the canvas automatically as I'm used to on MacOS --- but the canvas never contains any visible axis, only a grey frame! In this case show() does nothing. The figure does seem to be getting built somewhere: as I add lines and curves, I can call gca().get_children() and see that more figures are being added to the axis; I can also use gcf().save_fig('foo.png') to put reasonable output to a file. But for some reason the communication with the X window is broken.

I believe that I'm using the TK backend; I'm not married to that choice, but it's not clear how I should install other backends.

I would appreciate any guidance that ends with my plotting interactively.

Answer 1

It seems to have been a transient bug due to having followed the head of the development tree. After updating this morning using

git pull && python setup.py install

in both directories, I have proper interactive behavior.