Global matplotlib style with objects interface

[juanitorduz]

Hey! thanks for the amazing 0.12 release 🚀 !

I want to use the new object interface while using a global matplotlib style following https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.objects.Plot.theme.html#seaborn.objects.Plot.theme

I have tried:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import seaborn.objects as so

anscombe = sns.load_dataset("anscombe")

plt.style.use("bmh")

sns.set_theme({**style.library["bmh"]})
sns.set_style({**style.library["bmh"]})

sns.set_theme(rc=style.library["bmh"])
sns.set_style(rc=style.library["bmh"])


p = (
    so.Plot(anscombe, "x", "y")
    .facet("dataset", wrap=2)
    .add(so.Line(), so.PolyFit(order=1))
    .add(so.Dot())
)
p

but I am still getting:

Any tips on how to make this work? Thanks!

Remark: With the "old" seaborn's functional API it works as expected.

[mwaskom]

There is some context in the PR: #2929

One of the design principles in the Plot interface is to avoid all of the magical global state stuff that matplotlib (and the function interface) does. So, no pyplot, no global rcParams, etc. I do expect that there will be some ability to set default behavior through Plot itself, but I'm not sure exactly what that should look like yet. So for now you'll need to set the them on every plot (sorry), like this

(
    so.Plot(anscombe, "x", "y")
    .facet("dataset", wrap=2)
    .add(so.Line(), so.PolyFit(order=1))
    .add(so.Dot())
    .theme(plt.style.library["bmh"])
)

[juanitorduz]

Thank you very much for the explanation! 😊 I'll keep exploring the new object API 🚀

[ravwojdyla]

FYI in my case to "propagate" the global style changes:

import seaborn as sns
import seaborn.objects as so
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

my_palette = ...

sns.set_theme(style="whitegrid", palette=my_palette)
plt.rc("figure", figsize=(16, 4), dpi=150)

To the Plot API, I had to:

(
    so.Plot(...)
    .scale(color=sns.color_palette())
    .theme(plt.rcParams)
)

I'm not entirely sure that's optimal/best solution, would appreciate input if there's a better way. Also looking forward to defaults in Objects API 🤞

[mwaskom]

AFK but wouldn’t think you need both there; what is in the dict returned by axes_style() that isn’t in rcParams?

[ravwojdyla]

@mwaskom ah, right theme(plt.rcParams) is enough - thanks. Updated the comment.

[mwaskom]

See #3223