Plotting in a non-blocking way with Matplotlib

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A simple trick that works for me is the following:

1. Use the block = False argument inside show: plt.show(block = False)
2. Use another plt.show() at the end of the .py script.

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Example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.imshow(add_something)
plt.xlabel("x")
plt.ylabel("y")

plt.show(block=False)

#more code here (e.g. do calculations and use print to see them on the screen

plt.show()

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Note: plt.show() is the last line of my script.

I spent a long time looking for solutions, and found this answer.

It looks like, in order to get what you (and I) want, you need the combination of plt.ion(), plt.show() (not with block=False) and, most importantly, plt.pause(.001) (or whatever time you want). The pause is needed because the GUI events happen while the main code is sleeping, including drawing. It's possible that this is implemented by picking up time from a sleeping thread, so maybe IDEs mess with that—I don't know.

Here's an implementation that works for me on python 3.5:

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

def main():
    plt.axis([-50,50,0,10000])
    plt.ion()
    plt.show()

    x = np.arange(-50, 51)
    for pow in range(1,5):   # plot x^1, x^2, ..., x^4
        y = [Xi**pow for Xi in x]
        plt.plot(x, y)
        plt.draw()
        plt.pause(0.001)
        input("Press [enter] to continue.")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()