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

3-D plots with Plotly on mobile web get the view reset every time a button is pressed in the modebar

Open
#5,352 0 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
javascript, python
Domain
data-visualization, frontend, mobile

Research direction

Open the attached plotlyBugReport.html and reproduce the 3-D modebar behavior in a mobile web browser, switching between zoom, pan, and rotate. Trace the Plotly web rendering and modebar entry points involved; done means changing commands preserves the current view instead of resetting it.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug P2

Plotly is a fantastic tool to generate a great number of plots, hence I want first of all to thank the developers for a great tool.

When drawing 3-D plots, it is useful to be able to rotate, drag and zoom in coordinated way, specially on mobile, as screen is small and some details can only be seen by an appropriate combination of these. In desktop web browser, the mouse alone enables these three navigation actions, i.e. zoom with the mouse wheel, rotate with left-click and drag, pan with right-click and drag, and the modebar works as expected, i.e. pushing the zoom button allows zooming, then selecting rotate keeps the view to rotate around the new origin, and so on. On the other hand, when viewing the same plot on a mobile web browser, where touch interaction is very limited (only single touch and drag to rotate, no two-finger to pinch zoom/drag) the only way to achieve this is with the modebar, unfortunately, it does not work as expected, as everytime one selects one of the navigation commands (zoom, pan, rotate), the view goes to the default state, hence it is not possible to combine these. It would be nice if the modebar replicated in the mobile platform the performance seen in desktop, or even better two-finger drag/pinch could be used to pan/zoom, as it is done e.g. in the google glviewer, as selecting on-screen buttons in small screens is slow and problematic.

plotlyBugReport.html

Dominant language
Python
Stars
18.8k
Forks
2.8k
Avg merge
13h 41m
Merged PRs (30d)
21

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

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 plotly/plotly.py

All issues in plotly/plotly.py

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.