Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

difference in plt.gca() behaviour between inline and notebook backends

Open
#13 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
jupyter-notebook, matplotlib

Research direction

Reproduce the report with a notebook cell that creates a 3D axes, followed by a cell using plt.gca(), in both the inline and notebook backends. Compare the current-plot behavior when running through an IPython kernel. Done means both backends consistently handle the current plot across cell boundaries.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have one notebook cell that creates a 3D axes, which I want to plot into in the next cell.

With the inline backend

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 3 18 55 pm

we see that the "current plot" has been forgotten, and plt.gca() creates a new 2D plot.

With the notebook backend

The behaviour is different

Screen Shot 2022-01-26 at 3 23 57 pm

and plt.gca() remembers the 3D plot across the cell boundaries.

Expected behaviour

The same in both cases, ideally the remembering the current plot across the cell boundary. I'm not sure which behaviour is "correct" but the difference is a problem when I'm running code in an ipython kernel from a client.

Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
Stars
31
Forks
39
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from ipython/matplotlib-inline

All issues in ipython/matplotlib-inline

Similar issues

More Backend & API Design issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.