@almarklein @lcampagn this is what `matplotlib` always does (interactive mode or otherwise) -- since that's been pretty extensively tested and used I assumed it was likely to be "best practice", or be a fix/workaround for some systems. I got the ideas for these changes from there. I'll have to ping the `matplotlib` list to see the motivation, or read more about it. I assumed they knew what they were doing and had a good motivation, but it's possible that we don't need it for our package.