If your goal is to use the zoom/pan ability, you may be better served by the (poorly documented...) toolmanager API.

I don't think the new toolmanager API has been implemented for Wx yet.

This is a bit orthogonal to that work, but this is self-contained to the Wx backend and is backward compatible. I am 👍 on this going in as-is.

@DietmarSchwertberger Thank you for your work on this.

I was not aware of that. A cleaner and more straightforward approach with separation of functionality and GUI elements would be nice.
I doubt that this exists anywhere yet for the wx backends.
E.g. a draw_rubberband method is only in the NavigationToolbar or now in the NavigationController.

The only documentation I found right now is stating that it's experimental and only in gtk3 and tk.
If one of these implementations is production-ready, then it might be possible to restructure the wx code in the same way. That seems doable, but my testing capabilities are limited...

For my wxGlade examples, I need to ship the restructured version anyway as I can't rely on anyone upgrading matplotlib immediately.

fwiw I would much prefer updating the toolmanager API for wx.

I had a look at the example and tried it with Tk instead of GTK as I'm using Windows.
The toolmanager API looks promising, but I think it is out of scope for me to implement this now.
Also, I don't want to take the ToolContainer approach. I just want to have the API for integration, not the toolbar or the status bar with their GUI elements.
It's not clear to me whether this would be possible at all. With the NavigationToolbar it was only possible after splitting as in the pull request. Even if I implement a ToolContainer without the GUI frontend, then I'm not better off than before.

@DietmarSchwertberger Using the toolmanager you can achieve what you want, In your lager application you won't use the toolbar, but just the toolmanager that gives you access to all the tools without the need for the gui part.

I agree that we are lacking documentation for the toolmanager, but have you checked https://matplotlib.org/api/backend_managers_api.html ?

I would really prefer this to go in the direction of the ToolManager, if we all push in the same direction we can move forward.
There is a PR open for QT implementation #9934 maybe it can help you to see what needs to be done

Would a PR be accepted that just implements these, i.e. without an actual tool or status bar implementation?

SaveFigureWx
SetCursorWx
RubberbandWx
...
backend_tools.ToolSaveFigure = SaveFigureWx
#backend_tools.ToolConfigureSubplots = ConfigureSubplotsQt
backend_tools.ToolSetCursor = SetCursorWx
backend_tools.ToolRubberband = RubberbandWx

Things seem to work fine with the tools copied from Qt and Tk implementations.
After some more testing, I will upload a pull request with the classes mentioned above.
So this PR can be closed.