Re: [matplotlib-devel] Another try at interactive gui thread

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

Steve Chaplin wrote:

> I created a module that allows interactive matplotlib access from a
> python shell, its a modified version of
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/65109
> 
> This method seems to work for me (on Linux) and is not very intrusive to
> matplotlib code - it just requires that 'gui_cmd()' is used to execute
> all gui commands when in interactive mode.
> 
> Any comments?

In case anyone is interested, here's a lightweight, standalone (non-ipython) 
GTK threaded interactive interpreter with matplotlib support.  This code is 
also based on the same ASPN recipe, it's basically the prototype I used to 
understand that recipe when I was adding the matplotlib support to IPython.

The threading tricks are the gold in that recipe, but the rest of the code is 
rather messy.  I pretty much rewrote it when studying it (while keeping the 
threading core).  Perhaps this may be of use to others.  The ASPN recipe 
duplicates a lot of the functionality in the code.py module from the standard 
library, which is completely unnecessary (it's guaranteed to be there in any 
python installation).  By using code.py, the whole thing can be rewritten much 
more cleanly (and you benefit from a good implementation in the stdlib for all 
the interpreter emulation parts).

I think I sent this to John a while back so he could replace the 
interactive.py shipped with matplotlib.  I fully acknowledge in the header the 
ASPN recipe as the origin of the threading solution.

The pylab support in current ipython is basically this same idea, but 
generalized to work with either GTK or WX, and blended into the IPython code 
structure (that wasn't too bad, since ipython itself is based on code.py).

Cheers,

f