[IPython-user] going through a lot of plots

[David Warde-Farley]

I wonder if anyone has a good pattern they'd like to share for how to  
page through a lot of plots (mayavi.mlab or matplotlib or Chaco or  
whatever).

I find myself in this situation a lot: I'm looking at a sequence of  
plots, one for each piece of data in a collection. I usually find  
myself writing a loop with a plot command followed by raw_input()so  
that I hit enter in the terminal window IPython session to move to the  
next item.  I usually make this conditional so that I can process in  
batch without looking at the plots if I choose.

This has the effect of producing a newline in the terminal every time  
I want to move on to the next plot, which is far from ideal,  
especially in the situation where I'm not printing anything else in  
that window.

I figure there probably is a general way of solving this problem  
satisfactorily that I just haven't thought of, but any toolkit- 
specific ideas would be appreciated too. I'd rather avoid mucking with  
event-handlers since it would force control flow to depend on the  
plotting toolkit, removing the ability to just "turn off" plot-n-wait.

Any thoughts?

David