Re: [Matplotlib-users] Set Figure's position

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Glaser <eg...@se...> writes:

    Eli> Hello, Is there an easy way to set the initial position of a
    Eli> Figure?  I'm using Windows XP and new figures seem to pop up
    Eli> in the typical Windows fashion where subsequent figures
    Eli> appear about 20 pixels down and 20 pixels to the right of
    Eli> previous figures.  How can I tell each figure where to pop up
    Eli> on screen?

matplotlib doesn't provide explicit support for this, but it is
possible.  What backend are you using.  The matplotlib Figure is
embedded in a FigureCanvas which is typically a GUI widget embedded in
a GUI Window.  In the pylab interface, the canvas is managed by a
FigureManager, which has a window attribute on most of the backends.

Eg for the GTK backend, for example, you could do

    from pylab import *

    import gtk

    figure(1)
    plot([1,2,3])
    manager = get_current_fig_manager()

    # see gtk.Window class docs at
    # http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2reference/class-gtkwindow.html
    manager.window.set_position(gtk.WIN_POS_CENTER)

    figure(2)
    plot([1,2,3])
    manager = get_current_fig_manager()

    # see gtk.Window class docs at
    # http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2reference/class-gtkwindow.html
    manager.window.set_position(gtk.WIN_POS_NONE)

    show()

For the WX* backend, manager.window is a wxFrame -
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~zeitlin/wxWindows/docs/wxwin_wxframe.html#wxframe

For the TkAgg backend, manager.window is a Tkinter.Tk instance -
http://starship.python.net/crew/fredrik/tkclass/ClassToplevel.html

Off the top of my head I don't know the right incantation for each
backend, but hopefully the classdocs I referenced above will help.
Perhaps Todd or Matthew can chime in with more Tk and WX information.

While this arrangement may be suboptimal, we are resisting the urge to
become a GUI library.  The temptations to abstract GUI functions for
use in matplotlib are many, and we are trying to keep this to a
manageable core (some event handling, some basic window management,
etc.).  It's been on my list of things to do to investigate anygui,
however - http://anygui.sourceforge.net - which would appear to solve
our problems but might require a substantial refactoring of the
matplotlib backends.

If you want full GUI control, you can embed matplotlib in your own GUI
application, following one of the many embedding_in_*.py examples in
the examples subdirectory of the matplotlib src distribution.

If you come up with example code for your backend, please post it to
the list.

JDH