Spyder / Jupyter plots in separate window

IPython console in Spyder IDE by default opens non-interactive Matplotlib plots in the same inline “notebook”. Fix this by creating separate windows for interactive figures in Spyder:

Tools → Preferences → Ipython Console → Graphics → Graphics Backend → Backend: “automatic”

Interactive figures are more useful in general to probe the figure data and zoom/pan the figure, unlike the static PNGs in the inline notebook.

Jupyter notebooks can also have interactive plots. Instead of static inline notebook plots with

%matplotlib inline

for inline interactive plots in Jupyter:

%matplotlib notebook

Example:

%matplotlib notebook

from matplotlib.pyplot import figure

ax = figure().gca()
ax.plot(range(5))

References: