scipy equivalent for MATLAB spy

Maybe it's your version of matplotlib that makes trouble, as for me scipy.sparse and matplotlib.pylab work well together.

See sample code below that produces the 'spy' plot attached.

import matplotlib.pylab as plt
import scipy.sparse as sps
A = sps.rand(10000,10000, density=0.00001)
M = sps.csr_matrix(A)
plt.spy(M)
plt.show()

# Returns here '1.3.0'
matplotlib.__version__

This gives this plot:

I just released betterspy, which arguably does a better job here. Install with

pip install betterspy

and run with

import betterspy
from scipy import sparse

A = sparse.rand(20, 20, density=0.1)
betterspy.show(A)
betterspy.write_png("out.png", A)