Unable to show figures in VS Code

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
jupyter-notebook, numpy, python, vscode
Domain
devtools, frontend

Research direction

Start by reproducing the minimal notebook example in VS Code with %matplotlib widget or %matplotlib ipympl, using the listed Python, ipympl, JupyterLab, and extension versions. Compare the result with the reported behavior; done means the interactive figure renders in VS Code.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Describe the issue

In VS Code Jupyter Notebook, after using %matplotlib widget or %matplotlib ipympl, no figures will show.

Minimal example:

# Enabling the `widget` backend.
# This requires jupyter-matplotlib a.k.a. ipympl.
# ipympl can be install via pip or conda.
%matplotlib widget

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
# Testing matplotlib interactions with a simple plot
fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot(np.sin(np.linspace(0, 20, 100)))

Image

Versions

 3.13.3 (main, Apr  8 2025, 13:54:08) [Clang 19.1.7 ]
ipympl version: 0.9.7
Selected Jupyter core packages...
IPython          : 9.2.0
ipykernel        : 6.29.5
ipywidgets       : 8.1.7
jupyter_client   : 8.6.3
jupyter_core     : 5.7.2
jupyter_server   : 2.16.0
jupyterlab       : 4.4.2
nbclient         : 0.10.2
nbconvert        : 7.16.6
nbformat         : 5.10.4
notebook         : 7.4.2
qtconsole        : not installed
traitlets        : 5.14.3
JupyterLab v4.4.2
/Volumes/Workspace/be-project/data/.venv/share/jupyter/labextensions
        jupyterlab_pygments v0.3.0 enabled OK (python, jupyterlab_pygments)
        jupyter-matplotlib v0.11.7 enabled OK
        @jupyter-notebook/lab-extension v7.4.2 enabled OK
        @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager v5.0.15 enabled OK (python, jupyterlab_widgets)

(jupyter nbextension results "Jupyter command jupyter-nbextension not found.")

Dominant language
Jupyter Notebook
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