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

Setting spines in matplotlibrc explains why it is not possible to simply edit Matplotlib defaults to produce R-style histograms. For scatter plots, R style data-axis buffer in matplotlib and In matplotlib, how do you draw R-style axis ticks that point outward from the axes? show some defaults that can be changed to give a more R-ish look. Building off some of the other answers, the following function does a decent job of mimicking R's histogram style, assuming you've called hist() on your Axes instance with facecolor='none'.

def Rify(axes):
    '''
    Produce R-style Axes properties
    '''
    xticks = axes.get_xticks() 
    yticks = axes.get_yticks()

    #remove right and upper spines
    axes.spines['right'].set_color('none') 
    axes.spines['top'].set_color('none')

    #make the background transparent
    axes.set_axis_bgcolor('none')

    #allow space between bottom and left spines and Axes
    axes.spines['bottom'].set_position(('axes', -0.05))
    axes.spines['left'].set_position(('axes', -0.05))

    #allow plot to extend beyond spines
    axes.spines['bottom'].set_bounds(xticks[0], xticks[-2])
    axes.spines['left'].set_bounds(yticks[0], yticks[-2])

    #set tick parameters to be more R-like
    axes.tick_params(direction='out', top=False, right=False, length=10, pad=12, width=1, labelsize='medium')

    #set x and y ticks to include all but the last tick
    axes.set_xticks(xticks[:-1])
    axes.set_yticks(yticks[:-1])

    return axes