Python interactive plot opener

Utility for loading pickled Python interactive plots from disk. Allows Python code to be run on one machine (server) and plots to be opened on another (client) machine. This is especially useful when the server does not support a GUI (e.g. Python running on WSL on Windows 10).

Features

• Drag and drop support.
• Watch folder for new plot files and automatically open newly created graphs.
• Cross-platform.

Usage

• Requires matplotlib and pyqt5 packages running with python3.
• On Windows, the tool can be launched as an executable file without using a terminal window by first associating *.pyw files with pythonw.exe. On Linux, it can be detatched from the terminal by executing nohup python3 plot_opener.pyw > /dev/null 2>&1&.
• Server should save plot files as follows:

  import pickle
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  
  with open('my_plot.pkl', 'wb') as pickle_file:
      pickle.dump(plt.gcf(), pickle_file)

Screenshot

Limitations

• Server and client may need to use the same version of matplotlib and/or python.