Matplotlib plots not showing up in Mac OSX?

Question

I am running Mac OSX 10.5.8. I installed matplotlib using macports. I get some examples from the matplotlib gallery like this one, without modification:

http://matpl

Answer 1

I can verify this on my end as well. To fix, here's what I did

sudo port install py25-matplotlib +cairo+gtk2
sudo port install py26-matplotlib +cairo+gtk2

Also, we need to change the default backend to a GUI based one.

Edit the file ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc, and add:

backend: GTKCairo

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Also, you can try the following, which may allow you to not need the GTK or Cairo backends. Edit ~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc and add:

backend: MacOSX

With the port with those variants installed, this works as well, but it doesn't require X11.

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By the way, the error that I saw was the following:

/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/matplotlib/backends/__init__.py:41: UserWarning: 
Your currently selected backend, 'Agg' does not support show().
Please select a GUI backend in your matplotlibrc file ('/Users/wlynch/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc') or with matplotlib.use()
(backend, matplotlib.matplotlib_fname()))

Answer 2

sudo port install py37-matplotlib +cairo+gtk3
~/.matplotlib/matplotlibrc used 
backend: MacOSX

Seemed to work on MacOS Mojave 10.14.4 with python 3.7 on the unicode_minus.py example above.

Answer 3

This is what worked for me. I just changed the import of Matplotlib

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Answer 4

I only had python 2.5 and I did not want to install python 2.6 on my mac. So I used different procedure mentioned in the following link to solve this problem:

http://www.gtkforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=54928

What that one actually needs is the following steps:

1) Searching where is the directory "pygtk-2.0.pc" and locate it. For example mine was located in the following directory:

/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig

2) Adding the path information to envirement variable. For example:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

3) Download the configuration information file "matplotlibrc" from matplotlib website http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/_static/matplotlibrc

4) Change backend to MacOSX in the file and save it

5) Copy the file to directory .matplotlib You can locate the directory in python by the following command:

import matplotlib
matplotlib.get_configdir()

Answer 5

When you try

plt.savefig('myfilename.png')

instead of

plt.show()

does that save the correct image named myfilename.png in the current path?

Answer 6

Do the following if anyone is using spyder.

1.) Start Spyder 2.3.5.2 from Anaconda Launcher 2.) Go to preferences -> IPython console -> Graphics -> Backend: changed it to "Automatic" 3.) Select "Apply" and close preferences 3.) Restart IPython kernel 4.) Create simple graphic like