[Matplotlib-users] easily accessing the default color cycle list

[Michael Kaufman]

On 1/10/17 1:18 PM, Thomas Caswell wrote:
> It is also documented
> at http://matplotlib.org/2.0.0rc2/users/colors.html which is too verbose
> to put into the docstring of every method (almost all of them) that
> takes in a color-like input.
>

Ok, but we've already got a nice paragraph:

     In addition, you can specify colors in many weird and
     wonderful ways, including full names (``'green'``), hex
     strings (``'#008000'``), RGB or RGBA tuples (``(0,1,0,1)``) or
     grayscale intensities as a string (``'0.8'``).  Of these, the
     string specifications can be used in place of a ``fmt`` group,
     but the tuple forms can be used only as ``kwargs``.

in help(plot) that has just about everything except the new stuff anyway.

Besides, help(plot) is the go-to method that (I at least) use if I want 
to look up the usage a kwarg. If it's there, then I can use (say the 
marker symbol) in scatter without needing the extensive extra 
documentation in help(scatter).

So having help(plot) extra-documented makes plenty of sense for me.

M

> Additionally, we will be adding alias to access the color by name for
> 2.0 final (see https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/7639 )
>
> Tom