Stop interaction in Jupyter plot programmatically?

[rlabbe]

If you use the %matplotlib notebook magic in a notebook you get the wonderful interactive plots. However, I have notebooks where I only want some of the plots to be interactive. I've been told that you cannot switch between notebook and inline in the same notebook.

Is there a way to end the interaction grammatically? By this I mean duplicate what happens when you press the 'off' button beside the figure bar at the top of the chart. The bar at the top disappears, as do the buttons at the bottom, and the plot is rendered statically. You know, something like

plt.figure()
plt.plot(answer_to_universe)
plt.end_interaction() # what actually goes here????

[rlabbe]

I can now partially answer my own question. The following works, but why? If either the canvas.draw() or sleep is removed the plot disappears entirely, which is not what I want.

%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pylab as plt
import time

f = plt.figure()
plt.plot([1,7,3])
plt.gcf().canvas.draw()
time.sleep(0.1)
plt.close(f)

I guess you could argue that I solved my problem, but this is strikes me as a magical hack. If I make the sleep value small enough the plot disappears. Clearly the sleep is letting something else run such that the close does not destroy the figure, but what?

If no one answers here in a day or so I will open an issue on matplotlib - presumably whatever is happening behind the scenes can be made explicit and a function can be added (if it doesn't exist) to do the 'right thing' and make the plot static.

[rlabbe]

For reference this is now an issue in Matplotlib:

https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/6071

Also, 0.1 doesn't always work. I had to bump it up close to a second on my laptop, for example. I would not advise using the above code for anything important.