Radio Buttons Grid

Using radio buttons in a 2D grid layout.

Radio buttons can be arranged in a 2D grid by passing a (rows, cols) tuple to the layout parameter. This is useful when you have multiple related options that are best displayed in a grid format rather than a vertical list.

In this example, we create a color picker using a 2D grid of radio buttons to select the line color of a plot.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

from matplotlib.widgets import RadioButtons

# Generate sample data
t = np.arange(0.0, 2.0, 0.01)
s = np.sin(2 * np.pi * t)

fig, (ax_plot, ax_buttons) = plt.subplots(
    1,
    2,
    figsize=(8, 4),
    width_ratios=[4, 1.4],
)

# Create initial plot
(line,) = ax_plot.plot(t, s, lw=2, color="red")
ax_plot.set_xlabel("Time (s)")
ax_plot.set_ylabel("Amplitude")
ax_plot.set_title("Sine Wave - Click a color!")
ax_plot.grid(True, alpha=0.3)

# Configure the radio buttons axes
ax_buttons.set_facecolor("0.9")
ax_buttons.set_title("Line Color", fontsize=12, pad=10)
# Create a 2D grid of color options (3 rows x 2 columns)
colors = ["red", "yellow", "green", "purple", "brown", "gray"]
radio = RadioButtons(ax_buttons, colors, layout=(3, 2))


def color_func(label):
    """Update the line color based on selected button."""
    line.set_color(label)
    fig.canvas.draw()


radio.on_clicked(color_func)

plt.show()

References

The use of the following functions, methods, classes and modules is shown in this example:

• matplotlib.widgets.RadioButtons

Tags: styling: color styling: conditional plot-type: line level: intermediate purpose: showcase