You can use gridspec + a for loop to do this.

I can see the point in this, but I feel that it goes against what we have
been trying to do, which is to decouple pyplot from the OO interface.

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Thomas A Caswell notifications@github.com
wrote:

You can use gridspec + a for loop to do this.

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#5139 (comment)
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I know about GridSpec, it is just a bit awkward to use especially when you also want to use share{x,y}.

Actually, moving the subplots functionality for generating a whole array in one whack into Figure is a step towards decoupling pyplot from the OO interface.

On consideration, I now agree this is a good idea. This should be a pretty strait forward copy-paste job, @anntzer want to take a crack at it?

I intended to name the new method Figure.add_subplots (by similarity with Figure.add_subplot) but @tacaswell prefers to keep it Figure.subplots (by similarity with plt.subplots). Any thoughts?

I can see arguments either way, but overall I agree with @tacaswell. It's shorter. Also, unlike add_subplot, subplots normally would be called only once for a given figure, unless it is cleared.

Sure, I'll change that. The other question was whether Figure.subplots should call clf first. @tacaswell suggested yes, but I'd rather not because (copy-pasting from diff discussion) IMO if you use the OO interface you know what you're doing and it's anyways easier for the caller to add a call to clf rather than to remove a call to clf if it's already there.

I don't know. @tacaswell, if clf is called inside, should observers be kept, or not? The danger of not including clf is that people might call subplots repeatedly on the same figure until they run out of memory, or something else goes haywire.

My main reason for wanting to call clf is that I don't like the logic that will, if things line up just right, add_subplot will return back to you a reference to an existing instance, but sometimes gives you back overlapping plots.

On the other hand, the reason to not call clf is to add a bounding box input to Figure.subplots (which iirc can go in through the gridspec_kw?)

On 2015/09/26 3:56 PM, Thomas A Caswell wrote:

|add_subplot| will return back to you a reference to an existing
instance, but sometimes gives you back overlapping plots.

This is a real mis-feature. We need to get rid of it ASAP, which
unfortunately can't be all that soon.

it also turns out that it (for what ever reason) does not do that in this case and just keeps layering new axes on.

Was this added to the package?

Yes, but it is currently on the master branch and not in a released version of the library.