We're actually using canvas.

http://bokeh.pydata.org/plot_gallery/iris.html

That has a selection tool you can play around with.

There are already some tools available, pan and wheel zoom, plot resizing, selection (on some plot types). Many more tool types are planned.

As for the architecture, BokehJS is built entirely on top of HTML canvas. The python bokeh library sends data and plot specifications to the browser, which uses BokehJS to render the plot and handle interactive tools, etc.

Gotcha, thanks.

Here is a linked brushing example in the IPython notebook. http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/ContinuumIO/...

For some reason I can't get any of the interactivity buttons to work.

EDIT: Ok, everything but the zoom works. How do you zoom?

The current zoom tool is a scroll wheel zoom, not a box selection zoom. Guessing that might be the issue since others have run into the ambiguous description as well. It will be labeled more precisely in master in a few days and in the next release as well.

If that is not the issue, please file a ticket on GitHub!

On a Macbook, the scroll wheel equivalent is the two fingered scroll and that doesn't seem to work for me (scroll the page).

Do you have the tool selected in the toolbar above? If so, please file a ticket on GH about this. Most of the Bokeh devs are on OSX so it would surprise me if it does not work on OSX, but if there is a bug we want to fix it!