%matplotlib inline gives the same result with or without it on Jupyter Notebook

Question

So I went through some questions being posted about the usage of %matplotlib inline function in Jupyter Notebook, I do understand that "%matplotlib inline sets the backend of matplotlib to the 'inline' backend" & "When using the 'inline' backend, your matplotlib graphs will be included in your notebook, next to the code". But, I don't see any difference in my plot results with or without the use of "%matplotlib inline". Can someone explain this to me if I am misunderstanding something? Here's a simple code I have tried:

Graph with %matplotlib inline

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot([[0,0],[1,1]], linewidth=4, label='random diagonal')

In the next code, I just took off the %matplotlib inline and it gives still gives me the same result. What is the point of using or not using the "%matplotlib inline" function then?

Answer 1

Thanks to @ImportanceOfBeingErnest, figured that the problem comes from the notebook backend already set to inline. Once you run the code matplotlib.get_backend(), you can see the backend within the notebook is already set to inline by default. I am guessing this comes as a default now in Anaconda's version of Python 3.7's notebooks.