How to recover matplotlib defaults after setting stylesheet

Question

In an ipython notebook, I used a matplotlib stylesheet to change the look of my plots using

from matplotlib.pyplot import * %matplotlib inline style.use('ggplot') 

My version of matplotlib is 1.4.0. How do I go back to the default matplotlib styling? I tried all the available styles in

print style.available  

but there doesn't seem to be a "default" option. I also tried

matplotlib.rcdefaults()  

For some reason, this gives me a gray background. It also changes the text from gray (ggplot style) to black, which may be the default, but also could be another random style.

Answer 1

You should be able to set it back to default by:

import matplotlib as mpl mpl.rcParams.update(mpl.rcParamsDefault) 

In ipython, things are a little different, especially with inline backend:

In [1]:  %matplotlib inline In [2]:  import matplotlib as mpl import matplotlib.pyplot as plt In [3]:  inline_rc = dict(mpl.rcParams) In [4]:  plt.plot(range(10)) Out[4]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x72d2510>] 

In [5]:  mpl.rcParams.update(mpl.rcParamsDefault) plt.plot(range(10)) Out[5]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x7354730>] 

In [6]:  mpl.rcParams.update(inline_rc) plt.plot(range(10)) Out[6]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x75a8e10>]  

Basically, %matplotlib inline uses its own rcParams. You can grab that from the source, but the arguably easier way is probably just save the rcParams as inline_rc after %matplotlib inline cell magic in this example, and reuse that later.

Answer 2

There actually is a default. But it's not listed under plt.style.available. Simply run :

plt.style.use('default') 

It returns the style to the default Matplotlib settings in, for instance, Jupyter Notebook.