Is there a way to suppress output of ipywidgets.interact() function?

[David Powell]

Hello all,

I have just upgraded my conda installation to the latest version of jupyter. I am now having a problem with ipywidgets.interact, in that it is impossible to hide the output value (which is often None), even when terminating the line with a semi-colon ';'

This is particularly problematic for widgets which generate matplotlib figures, because the combination of both text and graphic outputs causes heavy flickering. Previously I was able to resolve this by ensuring that no text output appeared, and everything worked quite smoothly.

So I would welcome any method of suppressing this text.

regards

David

[David Powell]

I tried assigning the results of interact to a variable, but this doesn't help.

I also ran Jake Vanderplas's "Hipster Effect" https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/11/11/the-hipster-effect-interactive/ example notebook, and I observed the same problem.

In both cases, I get much smoother results with the IPython Notebook v3.2.1.

Any suggestions as to how to workaround this problem would be appreciated.

[Benjamin Bowen]

Here is a potential workaround:

from ipywidgets import interact

def any_function_returning_value(word1,word2):

    new_word = 'Combining words is easy: %s %s'%(word1,word2)

    return new_word

class interact_workaround():

    def __init__(self, param1 = 'a word', param2 = 'another word'):

        self.p1 = param1

        self.p2 = param2

        self.w = interact(self.interact_bridge,word1=self.p1,word2=self.p2)

        

    def interact_bridge(self,word1,word2):

        self.new_word = any_function_returning_value(word1,word2)

f = interact_workaround(param1 = 'try this word')

printing f.new_word will show the return of the function outside the class.  Some creative messing around with kwargs and you could probably make something that implements as simply as interact.