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

I found that just that

fig = plt.figure()
toolbar = fig.canvas.manager.toolbar
tb=toolbar.toolitems
while len(tb)>0:
    tb.pop(0)

worked to remove all tools, and popping individual tools worked too. That said,

toolbar.toolitems=[]

didnt work, so the code must have another reference to this array somewhere.