[FIXED] How do you plot on a premade matplotlib plot with IPyWidgets?

Issue

I have a scenario where I would like to initialize the plot and plot a bunch of stuff on it before I run a widget on it. However, the jupyter widget refuses to plot on my already made plot. Instead, nothing shows up. A simplified example of this is below.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import ipywidgets as widgets
from IPython import display 

fig=plt.figure(1,(2,2))
axs=fig.gca()

def testAnimate(x):
    axs.text(0.5,0.5,x)

xs=widgets.IntSlider(min=0,max=3,value=1) #Create our intslider such that the range is [1,50] and default is 10

gui = widgets.interactive(testAnimate, x=xs) #Create our interactive graphic with the slider as the argument
display.display(gui)    #display it

I would expect the value of x to show up on axs, but it does not. I realize that in this case I could just do plt.text, however in my actual project that is not viable. So, how do I get the value of x to show up on my plot?

Thanks!

Solution

Assuming that you are using Jupyter Notebook, you first have to initialize the interactive matplotlib. You can do that by running either one of the following magic commands:

• %matplotlib notebook
• %matplotlib widget. This one requires ipympl to be installed.

Then, execute:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import ipywidgets as widgets
from IPython import display 

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
text = ax.text(0.5, 0.5, "0")

def testAnimate(x):
    text.set_text(x)

xs=widgets.IntSlider(min=0,max=3,value=1) #Create our intslider such that the range is [1,50] and default is 10

gui = widgets.interactive(testAnimate, x=xs) #Create our interactive graphic with the slider as the argument
display.display(gui)    #display it

Answered By - Davide_sd