Plot Matplotlib Charts on iTerm2 Terminal | Python DataViz

Key Takeaways

dear fellow coders welcome to one little coder let's say that you are a python programmer especially focused on data science and you use a terminal a lot and but when you want to make charts you may not be able to use your terminal you might have to fall back to jupyter notebook where your matplotlib might get displayed but not on your terminal but don't worry anymore there is an awesome package that i recently came across that can enable show you matplotlib plots on item 2. item 2 is something that is a lot of mac developers use um maybe because mac terminals max symbol terminal is not that great item 2 offers a lot of options so if you are somebody who uses item 2 and you also want to code on matplotlib or you want to display matplotlib charts within your terminal itself this video is for you let's get started so this package this library that i'm talking about currently it's called item plot so this is nothing but a item to back end for matplotlib so that you can directly plot your charts on uh directly on your terminal you don't have to actually go to jupyter notebook and then use it so usually what data scientists do they usually use jupyter notebooks on a web interface to iterate or do ripple but if you like to do it within your terminal this is going to help you a lot so let's get started and then see how to do this thing so the first step is we need to install the package so i'm going to open my item too i've opened my item let me get a big font big font okay make it big okay let me put this in the side put this in this side okay now we are set to go i'm going to say pip 3 install silent item plot because i've already got this package uh installed so it's saying that it's already installed so that's done once you do that thing you have successfully installed item plot so there is one more thing that you need to do which is to enable matplotlib engine for item so you have to export matplotlib uh item plot backend so what you have to do is copy this paste it run it once you are done with this thing the very simple way you can check is you can echo sorry echo mpl backend and then you can see that matplotlib sorry item plot is the back end for your matplotlib so now that is done you can invoke python3 yep and uh import mat plot lib dot pi plot as plt and plt dot plot which is i'm going to give 10 20 200 okay something something and 10 and close the list close the function and you have to always say plot show for this now when you do this thing it's going to ask uh are you ready are you okay to you know download a new file um png i'm going to say remember my choice and then say yes and you can see that it has successfully managed to display the chart so you can see that the chart is available here so the chart that we wanted but maybe the problem is now it doesn't help you do a lot of things interactively and that's where using ipython uh which is nothing but uh the jupiter notebooks terminal version and uh using that you can actually do everything that you do on a jupyter notebook within your terminal so let me show you how to do that um exit after exit let me clear it i'm going to say ipython once i say ipython you can actually see that there is an ipython cell so the first cell second cell third cell so within ipython now i can say import matplot lib.pipe plot as plt so my first cell is i'm importing matplotlib package and my second cell is i'm going to say um i uh sorry plt.plot and very similar to what we did so we have a list and close the list now we have the plot ready so now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to say plt.show and run it and you can see that the plot is available now on the next line now i can just press enter and then start iterating further like how i typically do it on my ripple environment i can just say okay instead of this um yeah i didn't write plt dot show and it again displays the chart pld dot plot of um three four five six close and then the chart is ready and then enter it plt for plt dot show and then when i run it you can see both the charts together because you know we are adding charts over charts so this is how you would display matplotlib chart on item 2 which is which is the go to terminal a lot of people mac users usually use so there is one more thing that i wanted to quickly show you which is it is not a simple chart like this but you can actually have uh charts which are you know also complicated so i'm going to copy a code that is available here which is this code that uses numpy and a couple of things to make a network chat so i'm pasting it and you can see the actual chart the network chart is available here so you can if you want you can just copy it um like that file is available if you want you can copy that but if you do not want like you can copy the image and then you know you can share it with um with your team or like on slack or whatever you want to do but if you do not want you can completely iterate it here and ipython also offers you a lot of options to save the notebook which you can check but if you just want to you know do a simple ripple you can simply do um this the the very simple step that you have to do is install item plot uh set the matplotlib back engine as item plot and then you're good to go you can start generating plot either within python shell or with an ipython so like whatever interface that you use you can use it so there is one more thing that you would probably need to know but i am not going to cover in this video is it also supports videos sorry and animations so matplotlib has an animation so you can do a simple animations with matplotlib if you have never done it i've got a video for it i'll link it in the description youtube description you can check it out but if you are used to it you can also display animation within your item terminal shell so you can you can check this thing so only a very simple requirement is you need to have the reverse video and also you need to have image magic installed that's quite simple i'll link this um you a github repository that you're like which you can follow and do it you have a couple of options for you to generate like if you want a resulting gif jeff you can you can do that a lot of these options are available but if you're not bothered about it if you just make a static matplotlib so you like at the end of this video you are good to go and then you can try it out and sadly uh as far as i know from this this is available only for uh at least this package is available only for um mac users who has got i term plot uh sorry i uh item 2 installed so if you do not have item you can click this link and then install item and if you are not using item and you are a mac user you are actually missing out a lot and it also supports dark theme it also supports light theme you can change the theme and then change the plot accordingly if you have any more questions please let me know in the comment section otherwise i hope this small hack is going to help you become a better coder so happy coding stay safe