I've put up a pull request implementing a new function, np.moveaxis, as an alternative to np.transpose and np.rollaxis: https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/6630 This functionality has been discussed (even the exact function name) several times over the years, but it never made it into a pull request. The most pressing issue is that the behavior of np.rollaxis is not intuitive to most users: https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2010-September/052882.html https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/2039 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29891583/reason-why-numpy-rollaxis-is-so-... In this pull request, I also allow the source and destination axes to be sequences as well as scalars. This does not add much complexity to the code, solves some additional use cases and makes np.moveaxis a proper generalization of the other axes manipulation routines (see the pull requests for details). Best of all, it already works on ndarray duck types (like masked array and dask.array), because they have already implemented transpose. I think np.moveaxis would be a useful addition to NumPy -- I've found myself writing helper functions with a subset of its functionality several times over the past few years. What do you think? Cheers, Stephan