Seaborn plots not showing up

Question

Plots created using seaborn need to be displayed like ordinary matplotlib plots. This can be done using the

plt.show()

function from matplotlib.

Originally I posted the solution to use the already imported matplotlib object from seaborn (sns.plt.show()) however this is considered to be a bad practice. Therefore, simply directly import the matplotlib.pyplot module and show your plots with

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.show()

If the IPython notebook is used the inline backend can be invoked to remove the necessity of calling show after each plot. The respective magic is

%matplotlib inline

I come to this question quite regularly and it always takes me a while to find what I search:

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.show()  # <--- This is what you are looking for

Please note: In Python 2, you can also use sns.plt.show(), but not in Python 3.

Complete Example

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

"""Visualize C_0.99 for all languages except the 10 with most characters."""

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

l = [41, 44, 46, 46, 47, 47, 48, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 53, 53, 53, 55, 55, 55,
     55, 56, 56, 56, 56, 56, 56, 57, 57, 57, 57, 57, 57, 57, 57, 58, 58, 58,
     58, 59, 59, 59, 59, 59, 59, 59, 59, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 61,
     61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 61, 62, 62, 62, 62, 62, 62, 62, 62,
     62, 63, 63, 63, 63, 63, 63, 63, 63, 63, 64, 64, 64, 64, 64, 64, 64, 65,
     65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 65, 66, 66, 66, 66, 66, 66, 66,
     67, 67, 67, 67, 67, 67, 67, 67, 68, 68, 68, 68, 68, 69, 69, 69, 70, 70,
     70, 70, 71, 71, 71, 71, 71, 72, 72, 72, 72, 73, 73, 73, 73, 73, 73, 73,
     74, 74, 74, 74, 74, 75, 75, 75, 76, 77, 77, 78, 78, 79, 79, 79, 79, 80,
     80, 80, 80, 81, 81, 81, 81, 83, 84, 84, 85, 86, 86, 86, 86, 87, 87, 87,
     87, 87, 88, 90, 90, 90, 90, 90, 90, 91, 91, 91, 91, 91, 91, 91, 91, 92,
     92, 93, 93, 93, 94, 95, 95, 96, 98, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108,
     109, 110, 110, 113, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121]

sns.distplot(l, kde=True, rug=False)

plt.show()

Gives

To avoid confusion (as there seems to be some in the comments). Assuming you are on Jupyter:

%matplotlib inline > displays the plots INSIDE the notebook

sns.plt.show() > displays the plots OUTSIDE of the notebook

%matplotlib inline will OVERRIDE sns.plt.show() in the sense that plots will be shown IN the notebook even when sns.plt.show() is called.

And yes, it is easy to include the line in to your config:

Automatically run %matplotlib inline in IPython Notebook

But it seems a better convention to keep it together with imports in the actual code.

This worked for me

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
.
.
.
plt.show(sns)

My advice is just to give a

plt.figure() and give some sns plot. For example

sns.distplot(data).

Though it will look it doesnt show any plot, When you maximise the figure, you will be able to see the plot.