making matplotlib graphs look like R by default?

Question

Is there a way to make matplotlib behave identically to R, or almost like R, in terms of plotting defaults? For example R treats its axes pretty differently from

Answer 1

Edit 1 year later:

With seaborn, the example below becomes:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn
seaborn.set(style='ticks')
# Data to be represented
X = np.random.randn(256)

# Actual plotting
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8,6), dpi=72, facecolor="white")
axes = plt.subplot(111)
heights, positions, patches = axes.hist(X, color='white')
seaborn.despine(ax=axes, offset=10, trim=True)
fig.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Pretty dang easy.

Original post:

This blog post is the best I've seen so far. http://messymind.net/making-matplotlib-look-like-ggplot/

It doesn't focus on your standard R plots like you see in most of the "getting started"-type examples. Instead it tries to emulate the style of ggplot2, which seems to be nearly universally heralded as stylish and well-designed.

To get the axis spines like you see the in bar plot, try to follow one of the first few examples here: http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/coding/gallery/

Lastly, to get the axis tick marks pointing outward, you can edit your matplotlibrc files to say xtick.direction : out and ytick.direction : out.

Combining these concepts together we get something like this:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Data to be represented
X = np.random.randn(256)

# Actual plotting
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8,6), dpi=72, facecolor="white")
axes = plt.subplot(111)
heights, positions, patches = axes.hist(X, color='white')

axes.spines['right'].set_color('none')
axes.spines['top'].set_color('none')
axes.xaxis.set_ticks_position('bottom')

# was: axes.spines['bottom'].set_position(('data',1.1*X.min()))
axes.spines['bottom'].set_position(('axes', -0.05))
axes.yaxis.set_ticks_position('left')
axes.spines['left'].set_position(('axes', -0.05))

axes.set_xlim([np.floor(positions.min()), np.ceil(positions.max())])
axes.set_ylim([0,70])
axes.xaxis.grid(False)
axes.yaxis.grid(False)
fig.tight_layout()
plt.show()

The position of the spines can be specified a number of ways. If you run the code above in IPython, you can then do axes.spines['bottom'].set_position? to see all of your options.

So yeah. It's not exactly trivial, but you can get close.