Matplotlib plots not showing up in Mac OSX?

When you try

plt.savefig('myfilename.png')

instead of

plt.show()

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

just to add a note,

The matplotlibrc file was not present on my system and I had to to download a copy from the matplotlib website. Future users may have to do the same.

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()

This is what worked for me:

brew install pkg-config
brew link pkg-config
brew install pygtk
brew install freetype
brew install libpng

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/freetype/*/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc

git clone [email protected]:matplotlib/matplotlib.git
cd matplotlib
python setup.py build
python setup.py install

References:

http://blog.caoyuan.me/2012/08/matplotlib-error-mac-os-x/
http://matplotlib.org/faq/installing_faq.html#install-from-git
http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~dtsang/python.html

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

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

I had the same problem, even I could see how a new application window was created and immediately disappeared.

Simple solution – just check if you have

# Assumes you have imported "matplotlib.pyplot" as "plt"
plt.show()

after the plot

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

As a temporary work around one can save the figure to a .png/.jpg/.pdf and make use of that file for the moment.

## assuming price is out DataFrame that contains columns that we want to plot 
pdf_plot=price.plot().get_figure()  
pdf_plot.savefig('Stocks.pdf')

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.

Mac comes with its own python (read from here, which is not the best), I would suggest just a clean install of some Python 3.7 or so along with Anaconda and then introduce them as interpreters to PyCharm. anything will work fine and you wont need to add ad-hoc solutions like “backend: MacOSX” or so.

I wanna share this workable solution for me,

import matplotlib
import platform
if platform.system() == 'Darwin':
    matplotlib.use('MacOSX')

After the plot simply add –

plt.show()

The reason this works is to do with interactive vs non-interactive mode. If the backend is opened in non-interactive mode, plt.show() is required at the end of the code chunk. You can check the status by calling plt.isinteractive() and toggle the status using plt.ion() and plt.ioff()

conda
The default python provided in (Ana)conda is not a framework build. However, a framework build can easily be installed, both in the main environment and in conda envs: install python.app (conda install python.app) and use pythonw rather than python.