Animate / update a matplotlib plot in VS Code notebook

Question

Using Jupyter Notebook, I can create an animated plot (based on this sample code):

%matplotlib notebook
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

x = np.arange(0, 2*np.pi, 0.01)
line, = ax.plot(x, np.sin(x))

def init():
    line.set_ydata([np.nan] * len(x))
    return line,

def animate(i):
    line.set_ydata(np.sin(x + i / 100))  # update the data.
    return line,

ani = animation.FuncAnimation(
    fig, animate, init_func=init, interval=2, blit=True, save_count=50)

plt.show()

Is it possible to do so in Visual Studio Code's notebook editor? I think it involves the magic %matplotlib notebook mode which VS Code does not seem to support, but I don't know if there is an alternative.

This blog post talks about how to render an animation to an HTML5 plot that gets embedded, but this is not my goal: my plot will be updated based on a live data feed. — rgov
– rgov, Commented Oct 30, 2020 at 18:15

Ianhi · Accepted Answer · 2024-09-11 16:40:43Z

35

Looks as though vscode supports ipywidgets (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/3429). So you can use the ipympl backend to matplotlib.

install with pip install ipympl (also available on conda-forge)

To use it you can use the %matplotlib ipympl magic.

%matplotlib notebook does some javascript injection that is very specific to jupyter notebook, so it will not work in vscode or even jupyter lab.

edited Sep 11, 2024 at 16:40

answered Oct 30, 2020 at 18:45

Ianhi

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6 Comments

rgov Over a year ago

This seems to work! The backend name might be widget now but ipympl also works.

Ianhi Over a year ago

widget and ipympl are aliases for eachother in the ipython source. I'm not sure if either is explicitly preferred.

Pierz Over a year ago

You may also need to install support for it e.g. pip install ipympl

David Siret Marqués Over a year ago

I tried that, and neither the widget nor ipympl show the plot...

oldpride Over a year ago

this works in my vscode but it interferes with other 3d plot. For example, if I use it to plot two things, they overwrites each other.

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