Mayavi hangs under Jupyter QtConsole

Question

After installing Mayavi from Christoph Gohlke's Python builds for Windows site , the following works from a plain interactive Python prompt:

import mayavi.mlab as MM
MM.test_surf()

But when I ran the same under jupyter-qtconsole , the window comes up and hangs.

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For reference, I have the following packages, installed in the order given, from the above website, over a fresh Python 2.7.13 install.

(These are just the dependencies to get a working environment with Jupyter, SciPy, matplotlib, Mayavi and just a couple of useful extras.)

• numpy-1.11.1+mkl-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• MS VS 2008 redistributable (from MS website)
• Pygments-2.1.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• traits-4.6.0-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• PyQt4-4.11.4-cp27-none-win32.whl
• VTK-5.10.1+qt486-cp27-none-win32.whl
• mayavi-4.3.1+vtk510-cp27-none-win32.whl
• pyzmq-15.4.0-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• certifi-2016.8.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• backports.ssl_match_hostname-3.5.0.1-py2-none-any.whl
• tornado-4.4.1-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• MarkupSafe-0.23-cp27-none-win32.whl
• Jinja2-2.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• mistune-0.7.3-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• pytz-2016.6.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• pyparsing-2.1.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• cycler-0.10.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• Pillow-3.3.1-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• wxPython_common-3.0.2.0-py2-none-any.whl
• wxPython-3.0.2.0-cp27-none-win32.whl
• python_dateutil-2.5.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• PySide-1.2.2-cp27-none-win32.whl
• matplotlib-2.0.0b3-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• scandir-1.5-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• ipython-5.1.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• ipykernel-4.4.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• ipyparallel-5.2.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• ipywidgets-5.2.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• jupyter-1.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
• scipy-0.18.0-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• Bottleneck-1.1.0-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• numexpr-2.6.1-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• pandas-0.18.1-cp27-cp27m-win32.whl
• sympy-1.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Answer 1

I found a solution in this thread . This works from within Jupyter QTconsole:

import mayavi.mlab as MM
%gui qt
MM.test_surf()

Note that the %gui qt command has to be issued after importing Mayavi.

(The explanation is that it "initialises Qt event loop support", not that this makes much sense to me.)