Increment matplotlib color cycle

Question

Is there a simple way to increment the matplotlib color cycle without digging into axes internals?

When plotting interactively a common pattern I use is:

Answer 1

You could call

ax2._get_lines.get_next_color()

to advance the color cycler on color. Unfortunately, this accesses the private attribute ._get_lines, so this is not part of the official public API and not guaranteed to work in future versions of matplotlib.

A safer but less direct way of advance the color cycler would be to plot a null plot:

ax2.plot([], [])

---

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.arange(10)
y1 = np.random.randint(10, size=10)
y2 = np.random.randint(10, size=10)*100
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y1, label='first')
ax2 = ax.twinx()
ax2._get_lines.get_next_color()
# ax2.plot([], [])
ax2.plot(x,y2, label='second')

handles1, labels1 = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()
handles2, labels2 = ax2.get_legend_handles_labels()
ax.legend(handles1+handles2, labels1+labels2, loc='best')  

plt.show()