[SciPy-user] going through a lot of plots

[Robert Kern]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 17:56, David Warde-Farley <dwf at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
> I wonder if anyone has a good pattern they'd like to share for how to
> page through a lot of plots (mayavi.mlab or matplotlib or Chaco or
> whatever).
>
> I find myself in this situation a lot: I'm looking at a sequence of
> plots, one for each piece of data in a collection. I usually find
> myself writing a loop with a plot command followed by raw_input()so
> that I hit enter in the terminal window IPython session to move to the
> next item.  I usually make this conditional so that I can process in
> batch without looking at the plots if I choose.
>
> This has the effect of producing a newline in the terminal every time
> I want to move on to the next plot, which is far from ideal,
> especially in the situation where I'm not printing anything else in
> that window.
>
> I figure there probably is a general way of solving this problem
> satisfactorily that I just haven't thought of, but any toolkit-
> specific ideas would be appreciated too. I'd rather avoid mucking with
> event-handlers since it would force control flow to depend on the
> plotting toolkit, removing the ability to just "turn off" plot-n-wait.

I usually write up a quick Traits UI that embeds the Chaco Plot with a
slider or whatever to select the dataset. This lets me move forwards
and backwards and abort in the middle much more naturally.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco