not clear how to transition from interact to custom layout widgets

For example, this does not work:

vb1 = VBox([x, xmin,xmax])
vb2 = VBox([y, ymin, ymax])
vb3 = VBox([c, cmin, cmax])

box = HBox([vb1, vb2, vb3])
display(box)

for cols in box.children:
    for wdg in cols.children:
        wdg.observe(plot, names='value')

The intended behavior is like this:

interact(plot, 
                       x=x,
                       y=y,
                       c=c,
                       xmin=xmin,
                       xmax=xmax,
                       ymin=ymin,
                       ymax=ymax,
                       cmin=cmin,
                       cmax=cmax                  
)

[jasongrout]

I think it is probably better to build a grid container widget that can be used outside of interact as well, perhaps using the new css grid spec for layout. Between having such a container, and using tools mentioned in #1021, I think it could be relatively easy to make a grid of controls in an interact-type situation.

[gioxc88]

I would like to add something because I also encountered the same problem. I will use the same example of @denfromufa

First of all you don’t need to refer to the w.children but in the final HBox you can directly use the widgets x, y, c etc … You only need w.children[-1] for the output

w = interactive(plot2dcolors, 
                       x=x,
                       y=y,
                       c=c,
                       xmin=xmin,
                       xmax=xmax,
                       ymin=ymin,
                       ymax=ymax,
                       cmin=cmin,
                       cmax=cmax           
)

box=VBox([HBox((x, y, c)), HBox((xmin, ymin, cmin)), HBox((xmax, ymax, cmax), w.children[-1]])

finally when you display your box this will only display the widgets and not the output of the function until you interact with the box

so for example if you call display(box) you will see the widgets but not the plot (only until you click on any widget) to solve this yo have to call w.update() in fact the interactive class has an event called on_display that calls the update method