[Matplotlib-users] Feedback on an implementation of a matlab-ish "datacursor"

[Joe K. <jof...@gm...>]

I recently got around to polishing up a snippet I've been using for quite
awhile.  https://github.com/joferkington/mpldatacursor/  and I was hoping
to get some feeding on the current implementation.

"mpldatacursor" allows a user to easily click on an artist and display a
customizable, interactive pop-up box displaying information about the
selected artist (e.g. x & y, label, z for images and collections, etc).
It's a stand-alone module (and in pypi), but you could also just download
the examples directory from github and copy the mpldatacursor.py file into
it to try things out.

A few key questions:

   1. Is this something that anyone else finds useful?

   2. Does it seem intuitive?

   3. Does the implementation seem flexible enough for most needs? (Note
   that any additional kwargs are passed on to annotate to create the "data
   cursor", so the appearance of the box is customizable through annotation
   kwargs.)

   4. Are there any obvious features missing?

   5. Any suggestions? (especially better name suggestions...)

If it is something that other people find useful, I'd be happy to submit a
pull request to incorporate it into matplotlib.  (If I did, it would
probably be best to drop the HighlightDataCursor class, as its limited in
what it can do.)

Thanks a bunch!

-Joe