Editor Guide

When you call matplotly(fig), an interactive editor appears inline in your notebook. This page explains each part of the UI.

Layout

The editor has three areas:

┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Toolbar:  [Undo] [Redo] [Save] [Apply] [Close]│
├──────────────────┬────────────────────────────┤
│  Sidebar (380px) │  Canvas                    │
│                  │  (live PNG preview)         │
│  ▸ Global        │                            │
│  ▸ Series 1      │                            │
│  ▸ Series 2      │                            │
│  ▸ Legend         │                            │
│  ▸ Profiles       │                            │
└──────────────────┴────────────────────────────┘

Toolbar

The toolbar sits above the sidebar and canvas:

Undo / Redo

Every property change is recorded on a command stack (up to 100 entries). Click Undo to revert the last change and Redo to reapply it.

Save

Opens a dialog where you can export the current figure as an image file. Choose the format (PNG, PDF, SVG, etc.), DPI, and download location.

Apply

Generates reproducible Python code for all your edits and replaces the current notebook cell with the code. The code is also copied to your clipboard. See Code Export for details.

Close (X)

Closes the editor. If you haven’t applied, all changes are reverted and the original figure is restored.

Sidebar panels

The sidebar contains collapsible sections. Click a section header to expand or collapse it.

Global panel

Controls that affect the entire figure:

• Figure size — width and height sliders.

• Labels — font family dropdown, title / label / tick font sizes, bold toggles, and padding sliders for the title, x-label, and y-label.

• Axes & Grid — spine visibility (top, right, bottom, left), spine width, tick direction (in / out / inout), tick length and width, tick spacing for each axis, axis scale (linear / log), and grid settings (on/off, alpha, width, style).

• Legend — show/hide toggle, frame toggle, font size, position dropdown, and number of columns.

• Colormap — palette selector that recolors all series at once (visible when the figure contains colored artists).

• Preferred Defaults — one-click button that applies a publication-ready style: Arial font at 10 pt, no top/right spines, legend off, tab10 colormap, and 75% figure scale.

For multi-subplot figures the global panel shows only figure size and font settings. Axes, legend, and grid controls move into per-subplot panels.

Per-series panels

Each detected series (line, scatter collection, bar group, etc.) gets its own collapsible panel with a colored dot indicator and the series label. Controls vary by plot type — see Plot Types Reference for the full list.

Shared controls

Some plot types have shared controls that apply across all series of that type within a subplot:

• Histograms — bin count, histogram type, mode, cumulative, orientation.

• Bar charts — bar width, gap, orientation, tick labels.

• Distribution plots — display mode (box / violin / jitter and combinations), box and violin widths, gap, orientation, tick labels.

Legend panel

Below the series panels, the legend section lets you reorder legend entries and toggle individual items on/off.

Profiles panel

At the bottom of the sidebar, the Profiles section lets you save and load style profiles. See Style Profiles.

Canvas

The right side of the editor shows a PNG rendering of the figure. It updates automatically whenever you change a setting in the sidebar. Rendering is throttled (minimum 80 ms between redraws) to keep the UI responsive.

Editing workflow

1. Launch the editor with matplotly(fig).

2. Expand the Global panel to adjust fonts, axes, and legend.

3. Expand individual series panels to tweak colors, line styles, markers, etc.

4. Use Undo/Redo freely — every change is tracked.

5. Optionally save a style profile for reuse (see Style Profiles).

6. Click Apply to export the code and close the editor, or Close to discard all changes.