Matplotlib can build interactive figures that are far more engaging for readers. Sometimes, a plot might be overwhelmed with graphical elements, making it hard to discern individual data points. On other occasions, some data points may appear so similar that it becomes hard to spot the differences with the naked eye. An interactive plot can address these two scenarios by allowing us to zoom in, zoom out, pan, and explore the plot in the way we want.
Through the use of interactive backends, plots in Matplotlib can be embedded in Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications. By default, Matplotlib supports the pairing of the Agg raster graphics renderer with a wide variety of GUI toolkits, including wxWidgets (Wx), GIMP Toolkit (GTK+), Qt, and Tkinter (Tk). As Tkinter is the de facto standard GUI for Python, which is built on top of Tcl/Tk, we can create an interactive plot just by calling plt.show() in a standalone Python script.
