Examples

Do you have a cool, standalone matthewplotlib example?

I'd love to include it on this page! Please send me a link.

Contents:

• Point Data Visualisation
• Surface Data Visualisation
• Nonlinear Visualisation
• Bars and Columns
• Boxes and Candles
• Media
• Maps
• Retro Animations
• Simulations
• Dashboards and UI
• Utilities

See the examples/ folder for source code.

Point Data Visualisation

Image	Example
	Line charts Line plot test, including series with missing values (NaN). By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Lissajous curves Brownian motion PCA visualisation with scatterplots and plot arrangement. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Quickstart 1 Coloured cosine waves with phase offsets. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Quickstart 2 Animated cosine wave with shifting phase and amplitude, as a loop of print(plot - prev). By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Quickstart 3 The same animation with the loop handed to mp.animate, which keeps the previous frame and the frame clock. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Scatter Spiral scatter plot with viridis colormap. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Starburst Line plot colour and thickness test. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Teacher-student regression Gradient descent on a simple teacher-student linear regression model. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source

Surface Data Visualisation

Image	Example
	Chromatic flow A moving incompressible velocity field, with hue showing direction and brightness showing speed. Its custom colormap consumes two-component vectors directly. By GPT 5.6 Sol. Source
	Domain colouring Six complex functions. Hue for phase and lightness for modulus. Zeros come out black and poles white. A dark ring marks every doubling. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Functions Mathematical function visualisation with scatter and function2. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Phase portraits Six planar vector fields as colour fields. Hue for direction and brightness for magnitude. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Time series histogram Time series visualisation with stacked scatter, pooled scatter, and 2D histogram. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Voronoi diagram Voronoi diagram using function heatmaps and scipy. By Gemini 2.5 Pro. Source

Bars and Columns

Image	Example
	Joint distribution Joint distribution with marginal histograms, demonstrating plot composition with hstack and vstack. By Claude Opus 4.6. Source
	Sorting algorithms Various sorting algorithms racing in parallel, visualised with mp.columns and mp.wrap. By Gemini 3.1 Pro. Source

Boxes and Candles

Image	Example
	Box plots Four distributions with the same quartiles and different shapes. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Candlesticks A simulated price series. By Claude Opus 5. Source

Nonlinear Visualisation

Image	Example
	Calendar heatmap Calendar heatmap of daily maximum temperatures in Oxford, 2025. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts and Claude Opus 4.6. Source
	Commit heatmap A year of commits to this repository as a strip of weeks. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Hilbert curve Hilbert curve visualisation of binomial data. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source

Media

Image	Example
	Image rendering Image rendering with various colormaps. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source

Maps

Image	Example
	Globe A spinning Earth based on projection inversion. Terrain, clouds, city lights, day-night, atmospheric halo. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Great-circle routes Ten long-haul flight routes on a world map. Try one of five different projections! By Claude Opus 5. Source

Retro Animations

Image	Example
	Boing The Amiga Boing Ball, 1984, animated using a rotating colour palette. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Doom fire The classic 1997 PSX Doom fire effect mapped through a custom palette using mp.image. By Gemini 3.1 Pro. Source
	Teapot 3D scatter plot with animated camera orbit. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Vaporwave A wireframe landscape scrolling under a banded sun. The backdrop of sky, ground and sun is an image of half-blocks; the terrain is one mp.line3 over the top of it. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts and Claude Opus 5. Source

Simulations

Image	Example
	Boids Boids Flocking Simulation. Simulates autonomous agents (boids) moving in 2D space based on simple rules. By Gemini 3.1 Pro. Source
	Life Conway's Game of Life with extra colours for newly alive/dead cells. The panels underneath track the cell counts and, on the right, number of terminal bytes written using different rendering methods. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Lorenz attractor Animated 3D Lorenz attractors showing sensitive dependence on initial conditions. By Gemini 3.1 Pro. Source
	Mandelbrot Animated Mandelbrot fractal zoom using function heatmaps and colormaps. By Gemini 2.5 Pro. Source
	Three bodies Three equal masses chasing one another around a shared figure-eight orbit, integrated under Newtonian gravity. By GPT 5.6 Sol. Source

Dashboards and UI

Image	Example
	Dashboard Live system monitoring dashboard showing CPU and memory usage. By Gemini 2.5 Pro. Source
	Sweep report A hyperparameter sweep reported in tables: runs ruled the way a paper rules a table, the sweep itself shaded by the losses it is showing, and a legend whose rows are coloured to match the curves beside them. By Claude Opus 5. Source

Utilities

Image	Example
	Axes gallery Axis configuration options: Side types, rule types. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Colorbars An island's elevation with its scale beside it, then the same scale in four directions and four thicknesses. By Claude Opus 5. Source
	Colormaps Gallery of all available continuous and discrete colormaps. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
	Demo Original library example combining images, borders, and scatter plots. By Matthew Farrugia-Roberts. Source
Run python examples/terminal_test.py	Terminal test Does your terminal render matthewplotlib correctly? Test of escape sequences for colour, redrawing in place, resizing, and a plot pushed against the right margin. See also compatibility. By Claude Opus 5. Source