New function for xylim

[kolibril13]

I would really like to use an intuitve function, where one does not have to define xlim and ylim separately.
A nice name could be xylim.

def xylim(xinterval,yinterval):
    plt.xlim(xinterval[0],xinterval[1])
    plt.ylim(yinterval[0],yinterval[1])

plt.xylim( [10,20]  ,  [9,90] )

This would make it possible to writer denser code, without loosing readability.
Further it would be quit intuitive to use.
It took a while for me to find plt.axis which does set both x and y limits in one line of code, however it is used with [xmin xmax ymin ymax] (eg. plt.axis([0, 6,0, 20])), which is in my opinion less readable then e.g. plt.xylim( [0,6] , [0,20] )
What do you think?

[jklymak]

There are already lots of ways to do the same thing in matplotlib, which leads to confusion, particularly if implementations drift apart. I think your proposal is close enough to plt.axis, and axis has a long long history (going back >30 years in Matlab), I think this would have a tough time being added.

[anntzer]

There's already both axis and also gca().set(xlim=(5, 7), ylim=(9, 10)) which also works and is certainly quite readable.
Closing, as I think the chances of this getting in are close to nil. Thanks for the suggestion, though :)

[tacaswell]

@kolibril13 Is there someplace we could better document axis and set(xlim=(), ylim=()) to make them easier to find?

[kolibril13]

Thanks for your responses.
I think in the documentation it could become clearer that axis can manipulate limits
https://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_summary.html

E.g. make "Convenience method to get or set some axis properties." to "Method to get or set some axis properties (e.g. xlim, ylim and xy-relations). Then people can find it more easily when searching there. Further, it would be really nice to be able to use also plt.axis([0, 6],[0, 20]) and not only plt.axis([0, 6,0, 20]) this would not break the current functionality, but gives the code more structure.

[tacaswell]

I suspect that we could do some argument number and length parsing to allow plt.axis(x, y) to work...

Could you open a PR with the documentation change and maybe take a look at extending the axis API in that way?

[kolibril13]

I suspect that we could do some argument number and length parsing to allow plt.axis(x, y) to work...

Nice!
I will do the documentation change in around two weeks, when I have time for that

[anntzer]

Let's not try to make axis(x, y) work. There's plenty of perfectly readable and barely longer-to-type alternatives available, and axis is so confusingly (very) different from axes which does completely different things and takes completely different arguments that I would rather "soft-deprecate" axis (without any removal plan -- it's too widely used to be worth it, and only a problem from a pedagogical PoV, not so much from a maintenance one).