readme.md

drawnow for matplotlib

Matlab^® has a great feature where it allows you to update a figure. You can simply call drawnow and have your figure update. This is nice if you're running a simulation and want to see the results every iteration. It'd sure be nice if Python/matplotlib had a similar feature to update the plot each iteration. This feature adds that functionality to matplotlib.

Example:

Usage:

from drawnow import drawnow

x = zeros((N,N))

ion() # enable interactivity, can be default
figure() # drawnow needs figure to clear
def function_to_draw_figure():
    #figure() # don't call, otherwise new window opened
    imshow(x) # python's global scope
    #show()   # don't call show()!

for i in arange(x):
    x.flat[i] = 1
    drawnow(function_to_draw_figure)

If you want to wait for confirmation after update or the option to drop into a debugger, call drawnow(function_to_draw_figure, confirm=True).

If you only want to show the figure once, call drawnow(function_to_draw_figure, show_once=True)

Installation

Two options:

1. Download this repository and run python setup.py install.
2. Run pip install drawnow.

Changes to code

This does require small changes to your code. All it should really amount to is moving figure(); plot(...); show() inside a function; not much.