Re: [matplotlib-devel] tkagg on OS X

On Tuesday, March 16, 2004, at 11:32 PM, John Hunter wrote:

>
> On OS X 10.3, I can run TkAgg fine, interactive works great from the
> prompt, etc.  However, when I on the figure window to move it or click
> on a navigation button etc, I get a "SetFrontProcess failed, -606"
> message and the desired action does not happen.  I am running under
> X11, launching python from an xterm.
>
> Do you get this Andrew?  Any ideas?

Yes.

Short answer: use "pythonw" not "python"

Long anser: The OS X Cocoa WindowServer (I'm paraphrasing the proper 
terms, which I'm sure are slightly different) requires something like 
any application that wants to open a GUI window must be clicked or 
equivalent.  Since that's not the way python generally works, pythonw 
for OS X was modified to do some black magic (LaunchServices??) to get 
around this requirement.  This stuff is not in the normal python 
executable. For this reason, I have my trusty ipython shell using 
pythonw on OS X.  There doesn't seem to be any problem running non-Tk 
apps with pythonw.

FYI, pygame has something that will print a complaint if it's not run 
with pythonw.  We could look under the hood and figure out how it's 
done there...