I noticed the same recently, and so I made a small experiment to summarize what was working where, and here it is
of course you need to pip install ipympl to use either widget or ipympl
for that reason I’m going to switch to using
%matplotlib ipympl
because it also works in the context of vs-code, and it’s often handy to be able to use vs-code as well…
| frontend | %matplotlib |
works ? |
|---|---|---|
| nb6 | notebook | YES |
| widget | YES | |
| ipympl | YES | |
| nb7 | notebook | KO - IPython is not defined |
| widget | YES | |
| ipympl | YES | |
| jlab4 | notebook | KO - IPython is not defined |
| widget | YES | |
| ipympl | YES | |
| vscode | notebook | KO |
| widget | KO | |
| ipympl | YES |