Grr, the pep8 build won't install...

👍 assuming this works reliably. We should document somewhere what None means. We also need to update matplotlibrc.template to reflect the change.

The pep8 issue was fixed by #4687

Hehe, good plan, I will update matplotlibrc.template and document it later this week (faq, what's new, anywhere else?), really we need a beginners guide/tutorial in which we can incorporate the examples into, but too big a project for now 😉.

I spent a long time trying to figure out how this "interactive mode" worked, looking through the examples, trying different combinations, until finally I stumbled across the FAQ. I think I intuitively expected it to work like this, then a quick search online and quickly found this SO solution

Re documentation that sounds sensible. I would also add a comment to both rcsetup and matplotlibrc.template explaining what None means. (Hopefully the Traits effort will mean that we don't have to duplicate information to much longer 😃 )

__main__ is kind of magic:

21:40 $ cat test.py
print('hi mom')
import __main__ as main
print(__file__)
print(main.__file__)

def is_interactive():
    'Return true if plot mode is interactive'
    ret = None
    if ret is None:
        ret = not hasattr(main, '__file__')
    return ret

print(is_interactive())

Yields

21:26 $ python -i test.py 
hi mom
test.py
test.py
False
>>> import test
hi mom
/tmp/test.pyc
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/tmp/test.py", line 4, in <module>
    print(main.__file__)
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '__file__'
>>> main
<module '__main__' (built-in)>
>>> main.__file__
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '__file__'
>>> is_interactive()
True

We got pretty badly burned by something like this last release cycle when we looked at PS1 to do something similar and broke things pretty badly for people who were working with embedded python interpreters.

attn @mdboom

As far as I see it, it works as expected above, is_interactive, it gives False while python exists in non-interactive mode, i.e. while it still executes the initial file, then gives True after that...

I thought about adding a check to for the -i parameter passed to python, but thought that could wait until later... perhaps I should look into it.

Anyway, pretty nice feature for just 4 extra lines (and 2 changed lines) of code.

Consider

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(3))

plt.show()

If you run this with python -i it blocks until you close the window. If you comment out plt.show() and do the same plt.show() behaves interactively. I am pretty sure we want plt.show() to be non-blocking when run under python -i, but it would be very easy to convince me that this behavior is the correct one.

This hasn't been responded to for a long time so I'm closing. Feel free to reopen...