How to view all colormaps available in matplotlib?

Question

I was wondering if there is a function call that can give me the name of all colormaps available in matplotlib?

It used to be possible by something along the lines of (see here):

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
cmaps = sorted(m for m in plt.cm.datad if not m.endswith("_r"))

But running this in mpl 1.5 does not return the new colormaps, such as viridis, magma and so on. On the new reference page the code actually hardcodes the names (see here) but I was wondering if a similar query to the above is still possible?

Answer 1

plt.colormaps() returns a list of all registered colormaps. From the docs:

matplotlib.pyplot.colormaps()

Matplotlib provides a number of colormaps, and others can be added using register_cmap(). This function documents the built-in colormaps, and will also return a list of all registered colormaps if called.

The list this returns includes viridis, magma, inferno and plasma for me in 1.5.0

Answer 2

Here's some code that plots all available colormaps linked to their ID's

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def plot_colorMaps(cmap):

    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(4,0.4))
    col_map = plt.get_cmap(cmap)
    mpl.colorbar.ColorbarBase(ax, cmap=col_map, orientation = 'horizontal')

    plt.show()

for cmap_id in plt.colormaps():
    print(cmap_id)
    plot_colorMaps(cmap_id)

The output looks like this

Accent

Accent_r

Blues

etc...