OSX How to bring Matplotlib window to the front?

Question

I'm trying to use matplotlib for chart visualizations, but it is very annoying to look for a window each time I run the project. Is there any way to force it to be on top of other windows? I use OSX 10.8 and PyCharm IDE and already tried

from pylab import get_current_fig_manager()
get_current_fig_manager().window.raise_()

Which fails with

AttributeError: 'FigureManagerMac' object has no attribute 'window'

I'd appreciate any other ideas.

Answer 1

This works for me from IPython:

from pylab import get_current_fig_manager
fm = get_current_fig_manager()
fm.show()

I haven't found a case in which show() doesn't work by itself, though.

Answer 2

you're call to window.raise_() is from PyQT. Indeed, you can raise the window in this way but you need to:

• set PyQT4 as your backend before you do any other business with matplotlib

And

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Qt4Agg')

• Either you fix you import statement (remove the brackets) or save yourself the import and access the window through the figure

with

window = fig.canvas.manager.window

• Only then you can call window.raise_() and the window will be in front of pycharm.

Answer 3

[cphlewis] had a great answer. I found myself doing this so often that I def a little function to pop all my windows up to the surface:

def pop_all():
    #bring all the figures hiding in the background to the foreground
    all_figures=[manager.canvas.figure for manager in matplotlib.\
        _pylab_helpers.Gcf.get_all_fig_managers()]
    [fig.canvas.manager.show() for fig in all_figures]
    return len(all_figures)