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Deprecate Axes.arrow/pyplot.arrow #20387
Description
Bug report
Bug summary
Axes.arrow/pyplot.arrow generates a FancyArrow, which has a rather awkward API (#12768); we typically suggest to use Axes.annotate/pyplot.annotate instead (even the docstring of arrow() does so!). We may want to keep FancyArrow around for backcompat (it is simple to convert calls to arrow() to ax.add_patch(FancyArrow(<the same args>))), but at least we should consider deprecating the toplevel arrow() function, which is just a bad trap for any new users.
Matplotlib version
- Operating system:
- Matplotlib version (
import matplotlib; print(matplotlib.__version__)): 3.4.x - Matplotlib backend (
print(matplotlib.get_backend())): - Python version:
- Jupyter version (if applicable):
- Other libraries:
Reacted by Tim Hoffmann, Jody Klymak, Caitlin Dancer and Loran Knol
Activity
Valkje commentedon Jan 23, 2025
I'd like to bump this. Just spent quite some time trying to get this to work on a polar plot before I stumbled across the relevant Github issues saying that
arrowwill not work there. Adding a note/warning to the docs that it probably won't work outside a cartesian coordinate system would already help a lot!(The current note only talks about Axes aspect ratio and limits, which is not the same thing as a different coordinate system.)
timhoffm commentedon Jan 24, 2025
There are 17k usage of
arrow()in GitHub repos: https://github.com/search?q=ax.arrow&type=codeI think we have to take it slow (and yes we should have started that process 4 years ago).
MNT: Discourage arrow()
MNT: Discourage arrow()