Using with sns.set in seaborn plots

Question

I have searched for a clear answer to this and have not been able to find one, I apologize if this has been asked previously. I'm using seaborn 0.6 with matplotlib 1.4.3. I would like to temporarily change the styles of plots as I am creating many figures in an ipython notebook.

Specifically, in this example, I would like to change both the font size and the background style on a per-plot basis.

This creates the plot I am looking for but defines parameters globally:

import seaborn as sns
import numpy as np

x = np.random.normal(size=100)

sns.set(style="whitegrid", font_scale=1.5)
sns.kdeplot(x, shade=True);

however this fails:

with sns.set(style="whitegrid", font_scale=1.5):
    sns.kdeplot(x, shade=True);

with:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-10-70c5b03f9aa8> in <module>()
----> 1 with sns.set(style="whitegrid", font_scale=1.5):
      2     sns.kdeplot(x, shade=True);

AttributeError: __exit__

I also tried:

with sns.axes_style(style="whitegrid", rc={'font.size':10}):
    sns.kdeplot(x, shade=True);

Which does not fail, however it also does not change the size of the font. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can stack context managers in Python:

import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt  
x = np.random.normal(size=100)
with sns.axes_style("whitegrid"), sns.plotting_context("notebook", font_scale=1.5):
    sns.kdeplot(x, shade=True)