How do I use colorbar with hist2d in matplotlib.pyplot?

Question

I want to do something similar to http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/hist2d_log_demo.html but I\'ve read that using pylab for code other than in python interactiv

Answer 1

A colorbar needs a ScalarMappable object as its first argument. plt.hist2d returns this as the forth element of the returned tuple.

h = hist2d(x, y, bins=40, norm=LogNorm())
colorbar(h[3])

Complete code:

from matplotlib.colors import LogNorm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

#normal distribution center at x=0 and y=5
x = np.random.randn(100000)
y = np.random.randn(100000)+5

h = plt.hist2d(x, y, bins=40, norm=LogNorm())
plt.colorbar(h[3])
show()