Before we conclude this section, we are going to introduce two more interactive backends that are rarely covered by books. Starting with Matplotlib 1.4, there is an interactive backend specifically designed for Jupyter Notebook. To invoke that, we simply need to paste %matplotlib notebook at the start of our notebook. We are going to adapt one of the earlier examples in this chapter to use this backend:

# Import the interactive backend for Jupyter notebook
%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import textwrap


fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6,7))
ind = range(df.shape[0])
rects = ax.barh(ind, df["Median usual weekly earnings ($)"], height=0.5)
ax.set_xlabel('Median weekly earnings (USD)')
ylabels=[textwrap.fill(label,15) for label in df["Educational attainment"]]
ax.set_yticks(ind)
ax.set_yticklabels(ylabels)
fig.subplots_adjust(left=0.3)

# Show the figure using interactive notebook backend
plt.show()

You will see an interactive interface coming up, with buttons similar to a Tkinter-based application: