Windows Pycharm with remote environment not displaying fgures

Question

I have installed PyCharm Professional 2017.3.2 on my Windows 10 machine laptop, and configured it to use a Vagrant Ubuntu 16.04 Server (Virtualbox) VM running a conda environment as the remote interpreter. I am able to execute Python scripts using this environment, but figures do not get displayed. For instance, the example in https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/scientific-mode-tutorial.html returns with exit code 0 despite no figure being rendered by the plt.show() command. No errors are reported.

The backend given by matplotlib.get_backend() is module://backend_interagg. I have seen mention of setting DISPLAY or installing Xorg on the VM, but this seems to be from older posts when QT was used in the backend. Can anyone advise on how to get plots to show with a recent setup?

Enloe

Just checking that you've tried plt.show(block=True)? – Embargo

@Embargo thanks for checking. I just tried this and saw nothing different. – Enloe

On Mac, it can be solved by, uncheck Settings | Tools | Python Scientific | Show Plots in Toolwindow. – Malina

@RockieYang thanks I've tried this also, to no avail. I wonder if the difference is because Macs are Linux beef and so support X directly – Enloe