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At creation time each manager is assigned a number (which is either 1 or 1 higher than the currently existing number) and there is some API in pyplot to get the list of current numbers etc. Currently in mpl-gui, this number is set in the promote_figure method and is a process-globally incremented number. I think the options are:

1. no change, the number of the manager is a vestige of an old API, it is harmless, but 🤷🏻 . Using an always incrementing counter means that we never have currently-live duplicates (because we never have duplicates)
2. allow promote_figure to take an optional num as input (but probably still increment the counter for cases where it is not given. We can then have the registries re-implement the pyplot scheme. One wrinkle in this is if you ask for the number before all of the figures are promoted, they do not have numbers yet so either we need to pre-assign them numbers (not great, where to store that), drop them on the floor (not great, the list of figures can depend on if you called show?!), or promote but not show (probably the least-bad).
3. make num required to promote
4. add the notion of num to creating Figure objects.

Having written this out i'm going to go with option 2. It is not too hard to let registries maintain the old pyplot behavior and I would rather have all registries behave the same than have a custom one just for getting as close to pyplot compatibility as possible.

We do not yet have a notion of "current figure", but using a pattern like we do with Artist.remove is probably the right thing to do for Figure.close

Originally posted by @tacaswell in #3 (comment)

Currently we instantiate figure registry instances, which maybe is OK:

import mpl_gui as mg
fr = mg.FigureRegistry()
fig, ax = fr.subplots()

but is it possible to provide a default registry with an import?

import mpl_gui.registry as fr
fig, ax = fr.subplots()

That would be more analogous to what we have now, but the cost would be a global lying around.

I was just testing out the examples from the docs and figured I would put some quick findings here while running on a Mac.

• Documentation: Change subplot_module to subplot_mosaic in a couple of places in the code samples
• qt5agg: mg.show() does not exit after closing both figures, the event loop keeps running
• macosx: mg.show() closing one figure closes all of the figures, as if the closeWindow gets sent to every figure, not just the one clicked.
• tkagg: In the second fr.show() call in the examples I get this error: _tkinter.TclError: can't invoke "wm" command: application has been destroyed (macosx seems to get through this and the qt5agg I don't think ever even gets here due to the event loop not quiting after the first show() as mentioned above)

The name is a good one, but mpl_gui.show (which requires a list of Figures to be passed) has a very different API than FigureRegistry.show (and mpl_gui.registry.show) and matplotlib.pyplot.show (to which you may not pass a list of Figures).

The current leading contender is display

Everything seems to work well with macosx from a standard Python terminal, but I decided to switch over to ipython and noticed that there is a mismatch in the alias names for the event loops (ipython seems to look for "osx" instead of "macosx").

import mpl_gui as mg
from matplotlib.figure import Figure

fig1 = Figure(label='A Label!')

fig2 = Figure()

mg.show([fig1, fig2])

UnknownBackend: No event loop integration for 'macosx'. Supported event loops are: qt, qt4, qt5, qt6, gtk, gtk2, gtk3, gtk4, tk, wx, pyglet, glut, osx, asyncio