Interactive navigation

All figure windows come with a navigation toolbar, which can be used to navigate through the data set. Here is a description of each of the buttons at the bottom of the toolbar

The Home, Forward and Back buttons

These are akin to a web browser’s home, forward and back controls. Forward and Back are used to navigate back and forth between previously defined views. They have no meaning unless you have already navigated somewhere else using the pan and zoom buttons. This is analogous to trying to click Back on your web browser before visiting a new page or Forward before you have gone back to a page – nothing happens. Home always takes you to the first, default view of your data. Again, all of these buttons should feel very familiar to any user of a web browser.

The Pan/Zoom button

This button has two modes: pan and zoom. Click the toolbar button to activate panning and zooming, then put your mouse somewhere over an axes. Press the left mouse button and hold it to pan the figure, dragging it to a new position. When you release it, the data under the point where you pressed will be moved to the point where you released. If you press ‘x’ or ‘y’ while panning the motion will be constrained to the x or y axis, respectively. Press the right mouse button to zoom, dragging it to a new position. The x axis will be zoomed in proportionately to the rightward movement and zoomed out proportionately to the leftward movement. The same is true for the y axis and up/down motions. The point under your mouse when you begin the zoom remains stationary, allowing you to zoom in or out around that point as much as you wish. You can use the modifier keys ‘x’, ‘y’ or ‘CONTROL’ to constrain the zoom to the x axis, the y axis, or aspect ratio preserve, respectively.

With polar plots, the pan and zoom functionality behaves differently. The radius axis labels can be dragged using the left mouse button. The radius scale can be zoomed in and out using the right mouse button.

The Zoom-to-rectangle button

Click this toolbar button to activate this mode. Put your mouse somewhere over an axes and press the left mouse button. Drag the mouse while holding the button to a new location and release. The axes view limits will be zoomed to the rectangle you have defined. There is also an experimental ‘zoom out to rectangle’ in this mode with the right button, which will place your entire axes in the region defined by the zoom out rectangle.

The Subplot-configuration button

Use this tool to configure the appearance of the subplot: you can stretch or compress the left, right, top, or bottom side of the subplot, or the space between the rows or space between the columns.

The Save button

Click this button to launch a file save dialog. You can save files with the following extensions: png, ps, eps, svg and pdf.

Navigation Keyboard Shortcuts

The following table holds all the default keys, which can be overwritten by use of your matplotlibrc (#keymap.*).

Command	Keyboard Shortcut(s)
Home/Reset	h or r or home
Back	c or left arrow or backspace
Forward	v or right arrow
Pan/Zoom	p
Zoom-to-rect	o
Save	ctrl + s
Toggle fullscreen	f or ctrl + f
Close plot	ctrl + w
Constrain pan/zoom to x axis	hold x when panning/zooming with mouse
Constrain pan/zoom to y axis	hold y when panning/zooming with mouse
Preserve aspect ratio	hold CONTROL when panning/zooming with mouse
Toggle grid	g when mouse is over an axes
Toggle x axis scale (log/linear)	L or k when mouse is over an axes
Toggle y axis scale (log/linear)	l when mouse is over an axes

If you are using matplotlib.pyplot the toolbar will be created automatically for every figure. If you are writing your own user interface code, you can add the toolbar as a widget. The exact syntax depends on your UI, but we have examples for every supported UI in the matplotlib/examples/user_interfaces directory. Here is some example code for GTK:

import gtk

from matplotlib.figure import Figure
from matplotlib.backends.backend_gtkagg import FigureCanvasGTKAgg as FigureCanvas
from matplotlib.backends.backend_gtkagg import NavigationToolbar2GTKAgg as NavigationToolbar

win = gtk.Window()
win.connect("destroy", lambda x: gtk.main_quit())
win.set_default_size(400,300)
win.set_title("Embedding in GTK")

vbox = gtk.VBox()
win.add(vbox)

fig = Figure(figsize=(5,4), dpi=100)
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.plot([1,2,3])

canvas = FigureCanvas(fig)  # a gtk.DrawingArea
vbox.pack_start(canvas)
toolbar = NavigationToolbar(canvas, win)
vbox.pack_start(toolbar, False, False)

win.show_all()
gtk.main()