Matplotlib set_color_cycle versus set_prop_cycle

Question

One of my favorite things to do in Matplotlib is to set the color-cycle to match some colormap, in order to produce line-plots that have a nice progression of colors across

Answer 1

Because the new property cycler can iterate over other properties than just color (e.g. linestyle) you need to specify the label, i.e. the property over which to cycle.

ax.set_prop_cycle('color', colors)

There is no need to import and create a cycler though; so as I see it the only drawback of the new method it that it makes the call 8 characters longer.

There is no magical method that takes a colormap as input and creates the cycler, but you can also shorten your color list creation by directly supplying the numpy array to the colormap.

colors = plt.cm.Spectral(np.linspace(0,1,30))

Or in combination

ax.set_prop_cycle('color',plt.cm.Spectral(np.linspace(0,1,30)))