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

matplotlib >= 1.4 suports styles (and ggplot-style is build in):

In [1]: import matplotlib as mpl

In [2]: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

In [3]: import numpy as np

In [4]: mpl.style.available
Out[4]: [u'dark_background', u'grayscale', u'ggplot']

In [5]: mpl.style.use('ggplot')

In [6]: plt.hist(np.random.randn(100000))
Out[6]: 
...