Re: [matplotlib-devel] MEP9: interactivity

[Daniel H. <dh...@gm...>]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Michael Droettboom <md...@st...> wrote:

>  Here's my initial thoughts:
>
> There are a few examples in the event_handling that are going to be much
> simplified by this new infrastructure.  They should be updated to point
> people in the direction of this new/better/easier way.
>
> How do the *select* methods relate to the existing pick functionality?
> Does it replace or complement?  Are there any inconsistencies in usage
> between the two?
>

I think that in most use cases that I can think of, a user would want to
either use the picking mechanism, which fires an event, or go "whole hog"
and use the interactive manager.  Not both....if I remember correctly, I do
call set_picker() in the interactive manager, so that I can set a
reasonable tolerance around the artist for containment purposes...otherwise
it's too hard to point exactly at a line, for example.  So there is some
potential for interference there that would need to be looked after in the
new code.

As an aside, all of the on_* methods really encourage the user to use
matplotlib in object oriented way, which I really like, but probably most
people won't.  As a bridge for the functional-style users of mpl, we could
just implement all of the on_* methods in the artist.Artist class by
default by having them fire an event.  Then if someone overrides the
method, fine, but if they don't, there is an event fired.


> Other than that, I'm not seeing any obvious issues with the MEP.  I'd love
> to see the code when it's ready.
>

I'll probably have an example code, still in its mix-in form, in a branch
for you to look at soon.  This way, the discussion can turn more concrete.
 The example code will also be a runnable sample so that you can play with
the interactivity.