Matplotlib: cancelling the offset of axis introduced in matplotlib 2.0 [duplicate]

Answer 1

In matplotlib v2.0.x, the default axes margin has changed, from 0 to 0.05, which is the value controlling the whitespace around your data on the axes. See here for more on the reasoning behind this change.

There are several ways to revert to the previous behaviour.

1) To reset margins to 0 for a single Axes instance:

plt.margins(0)

or

ax.margins(0)

2) To reset margins to 0 for all plots in a script, use rcParams and set this at the top of your script:

plt.rcParams['axes.autolimit_mode'] = 'round_numbers'
plt.rcParams['axes.xmargin'] = 0.
plt.rcParams['axes.ymargin'] = 0.

3) To change the default value for all plots on a machine, modify your the matplotlibrc file to include these lines:

axes.autolimit_mode: round_numbers
axes.xmargin        : 0.
axes.ymargin        : 0.

Note that to use method (1) and truly get the old behaviour, you may also need to set plt.rcParams['axes.autolimit_mode'] = 'round_numbers'.

Answer 2

Guess whether its good practice is a bit of a discussion. It somehow suggest that your plot continues (but you just show a window of it), so if your plot is only defined in this region having an offset would make sense. If it actually continues but you just plot this part, then it's logical to remove it.

The scalable approach is

 plt.gca().set_xlim([np.min(x), np.max(x)])