Question: I'm writing a simple Python application that uses matplotlib to display a few figures on screen. The number of figures generated is based on user input and changes throughout the application's life. The user has the ability to issue a "plot" command to generate a new figure window with the selected data series. In order to improve the user experience, I would like to provide another command that would programmatically arrange all open figure windows in some convenient arrangement (e.g. tile them across the available screen space).

I believe to have found APIs that allow me to adjust the size of the figure window (in pixels), but haven't had any success in finding a way to set their absolute position on screen. Is there a way to do this without delving into the details of whatever backend is in use? I would like to do this in a backend-agnostic way so I can avoid relying upon implementation details that might change in the future.

Answer: 
Inspired by @theo answer, I wrote a script to move and resize a window to a specific standard position on the screen. This was tested with the Qt4Agg backend:

```
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def move_figure(position="top-right"):
    '''
    Move and resize a window to a set of standard positions on the screen.
    Possible positions are:
    top, bottom, left, right, top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right
    '''

    mgr = plt.get_current_fig_manager()
    mgr.full_screen_toggle()  # primitive but works to get screen size
    py = mgr.canvas.height()
    px = mgr.canvas.width()

    d = 10  # width of the window border in pixels
    if position == "top":
        # x-top-left-corner, y-top-left-corner, x-width, y-width (in pixels)
        mgr.window.setGeometry(d, 4*d, px - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)
    elif position == "bottom":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(d, py/2 + 5*d, px - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)
    elif position == "left":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(d, 4*d, px/2 - 2*d, py - 4*d)
    elif position == "right":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(px/2 + d, 4*d, px/2 - 2*d, py - 4*d)
    elif position == "top-left":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(d, 4*d, px/2 - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)
    elif position == "top-right":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(px/2 + d, 4*d, px/2 - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)
    elif position == "bottom-left":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(d, py/2 + 5*d, px/2 - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)
    elif position == "bottom-right":
        mgr.window.setGeometry(px/2 + d, py/2 + 5*d, px/2 - 2*d, py/2 - 4*d)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    # Usage example for move_figure()

    plt.figure(1)
    plt.plot([0, 1])
    move_figure("top-right")

    plt.figure(2)
    plt.plot([0, 3])
    move_figure("bottom-right")

```
The following worked for me.

```
import matplotlib  
matplotlib.use("TkAgg") # set the backend  

if backend == 'TkAgg':  
    f.canvas.manager.window.wm_geometry("+%d+%d" % (x, y))

```