I'm writing a simple Python application that uses matplotlib to display a few figures on screen. The number of figures generated is based on user input and changes throughout the application's life. The user has the ability to issue a "plot" command to generate a new figure window with the selected data series. In order to improve the user experience, I would like to provide another command that would programmatically arrange all open figure windows in some convenient arrangement (e.g. tile them across the available screen space).

I believe to have found APIs that allow me to adjust the size of the figure window (in pixels), but haven't had any success in finding a way to set their absolute position on screen. Is there a way to do this without delving into the details of whatever backend is in use? I would like to do this in a backend-agnostic way so I can avoid relying upon implementation details that might change in the future.

there is not that I know a backend-agnostic way to do this, but definitely it is possible to do it for some common backends, e.g., WX, tkagg etc.

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use("wx")
from pylab import *
figure(1)
plot([1,2,3,4,5])
thismanager = get_current_fig_manager()
thismanager.window.SetPosition((500, 0))
show()

per @tim at the comment section below, you might wanna switch to

thismanager.window.wm_geometry("+500+0")

instead. For TkAgg, just change it to

thismanager.window.wm_geometry("+500+0")

So I think you can exhaust through all the backends that are capable of doing this, if imposing a certain one is not an option.