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ArcGIS 10.2 ships with MatPlotLib 1.1.1 installed. I am trying to display a non-blocking plot window.

Trials:

Launch an interactive plot in a Tk window from a toolbox. This causes the plot to display and the toolbox dialog continues to run in the foreground.

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

    fig = plt.figure()
    plt.plot(range(10), range(10))
    plt.show()

Changing plt.show() to plt.show(block=False) should make the plot non-blocking. This crashes ArcMap.

Attacking this from another direction - Create a python addin-in with a single button. That button executes the above code. Also crashes ArcMap.

Is it possible to get a non-blocking MatPlotLib plot via arcpy?

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  • This is an issue with Tk's event loop conflicting with ArcGIS. TK expects that it is the only GUI loop running in the process. The only real 'work-around' (and more of a band-aid in my opinion) I've seen for using Tk in ArcGIS would be to create a python script GP tool and disable running the script in process (detailed here) Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 11:05
  • @EvilGenius Unfortunate to hear that that is the necessary route. Not surprising, but unfortunate. Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:03

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This is an issue with Tk's event loop conflicting with ArcGIS. TK expects that it is the only GUI loop running in the process.

The only real 'work-around' (and more of a band-aid in my opinion) I've seen for using Tk in ArcGIS would be to create a python script GP tool and disable running the script in process. This is detailed in Another GIS Blog post titled Python Add-Ins and Tkinter.

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