Overview#

The Python package pyvistaqt extends the functionality of pyvista through the usage of Qt. Since Qt applications operate in a separate thread than VTK, you can simultaneously have an active VTK plot and a non-blocking Python session.

_images/qt_multiplot.png — pyvistaqt BackgroundPlotter#

Getting Started#

Installation using pip:

$ pip install pyvistaqt

To install this package with conda:

$ conda install -c conda-forge pyvistaqt

You can also visit PyPI or GitHub to download the source.

Once installed, use the pyvistaqt.BackgroundPlotter like any PyVista plotter.

Brief Example#

Create an instance of the pyvistaqt.BackgroundPlotter and plot a sphere.

import pyvista as pv
from pyvistaqt import BackgroundPlotter

sphere = pv.Sphere()

plotter = BackgroundPlotter()
plotter.add_mesh(sphere)

Important

On Linux/Wayland, Qt may currently require forcing the XCB platform plugin for pyvistaqt to work correctly. You can set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb directly in your script before importing Qt-related modules:

import os

os.environ["QT_QPA_PLATFORM"] = "xcb"

import pyvista as pv
from pyvistaqt import BackgroundPlotter

License#

pyvistaqt is under the MIT license. However, Qt bindings have licenses of their own.

pyvistaqt uses qtpy to abstract over the underlying Qt binding:

> QtPy is a small abstraction layer that lets you write applications using a single API call to either PyQt or PySide.

This means the Qt binding actually installed at runtime (e.g., PyQt5, PyQt6, PySide2, PySide6) determines the license obligations for the Qt layer of your application. Please refer to the QtPy documentation and the license of the binding you install to learn more.