Chapter 9. Adding Interactivity and Animating Plots

As a book focusing on the use of Matplotlib through elaborate examples, we opted to defer or simplify our discussion of the internals. For those of you who want to understand the nuts and bolts that make Matplotlib tick, you are advised to read Mastering matplotlib by Duncan M. McGreggor. At some point during our Matplotlib journey, it becomes inevitable for us to discuss more about backends, which turn plotting commands to graphics. These backends can be broadly classified as non-interactive or interactive. We will give examples that are pertinent to each backend class.

Matplotlib was not designed as an animation package from the get-go, thus it will appear sluggish in some advanced usages. For animation-centric applications, PyGame is a very good alternative (https://www.pygame.org); it supports OpenGL- and Direct3D-accelerated graphics for the ultimate speed in animating objects. Nevertheless, Matplotlib has acceptable performance most...