[MNT] Tracking issue: GitHub codespaces #26169

Summary

Recently, we added support for GitHub codespaces. With this configuration, contributors can open a pre-configured development environment and get started with contributing to Matplotlib right away from their browser.

If you go to matplotlib/matplotlib or your own fork (preferred) and choose "Create codespaces on <branch>":

This will open a browser window with a VSCode interface and a pre-installed development environment built over an Ubuntu image. You can then do

$ conda activate mpl-dev
$ python -m pip install -e .

After that you can run tests, build the documentation and run other commands.

This configuration also includes a lightweight fluxbox environment

This is a tracking issue to gather feedback and ideas for improvement on the codespaces configuration.

Pending tasks are:

• documentation on how to use it and current features (like connecting to the fluxbox desktop to see plots).
• auto-activate the conda environment (currently a limitation of codespaces)
• have pre-commit automatically installed
• suggest creating a new feature branch instead of committing to the main branch (important for new contributors)