How to modify the navigation toolbar easily in a matplotlib figure window?

Question

Is it possible to do something like the following to modify the navigation toolbar in matplotlib?

1. Generate a figure window, with: fig = figure()

Answer 1

The way I found to remove unwanted toolbar items is making a subclass, which is instantiated and used in a GTK application. As I manually create Figure, FigureCanvas and NavigationToolbar objects anyway, this was the easiest way.

class NavigationToolbar(NavigationToolbar2GTKAgg):
    # only display the buttons we need
    toolitems = [t for t in NavigationToolbar2GTKAgg.toolitems if
                 t[0] in ('Home', 'Pan', 'Zoom', 'Save')]

If you want to create custom buttons, you should take a look on the definition of NavigationToolbar2 in backend_bases. You can easily add your own entries to the toolitems list and define appropriate callback functions in your toolbar subclass.