python - How to modify the navigation toolbar easily in a matplotlib figure window?

Question

Is it possible to do something like the following to modify the navigation toolbar in matplotlib?

1. Generate a figure window, with: fig = figure()
2. Get a reference of the navigation tool-bar, with: tbar = fig.get_navigation_toolbar(), or better yet, just by: tbar = fig.navtbar
3. Modify the tool-bar through the reference tbar, such as delete/add/edit a button with something like this:
      tbar.add_button(<a Button object>);
   tbar.remove_button(a reference to a button);
   tbar.edit_button(a reference to a button);
   
4. Update the figure with: fig.canvas.draw()

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The way I found to remove unwanted toolbar items is making a subclass, which is instantiated and used in a GTK application. As I manually create Figure, FigureCanvas and NavigationToolbar objects anyway, this was the easiest way.

class NavigationToolbar(NavigationToolbar2GTKAgg):
    # only display the buttons we need
    toolitems = [t for t in NavigationToolbar2GTKAgg.toolitems if
                 t[0] in ('Home', 'Pan', 'Zoom', 'Save')]

If you want to create custom buttons, you should take a look on the definition of NavigationToolbar2 in backend_bases. You can easily add your own entries to the toolitems list and define appropriate callback functions in your toolbar subclass.