René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"[MNT]: API consistency for figsize","articleBody":"### Summary\n\nSplit out of #24617. Before we can implement this, we need a though API discussion (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/24617#issuecomment-2662713614).\n\nCurrent state:\n\n- The kwarg `figsize` is IMHO well named and extremly widely used. It must stay as is.\n- The methods `set/get_size_inches()` as also widely used ([90k matches on GitHub](https://github.com/search?q=%2F%5C.set_size_inches%5C%28%2F+NOT+repo%3Amatplotlib%2Fmatplotlib+NOT+is%3Afork\u0026type=code)) and thus cannot be changed\n\nWe have to make a tradeoff decsion here: What is worse the naming inconsisteny (1) or multiple functions doing the same thing (2)?\n\nI'm ok with going with (2), under the condition that  `set_figsize()` and `set_size_inches()` as not equal aliases. There should be a clear guidance what to use. In practice that means discouraging `set_size_inches` in favor of `set_figsize()`.\n\nThere's a separate discussion whether `set_figsize()` should accept both two individual parameters as well as one tuple. The tuple is mainly to make `fig.set(figsize=(w, h))` work because that single tuple is forwarded to `set_figsize`, but we could also create API infrastructure that specifies on the setter how multipe parameters can be handled in a set() call, i.e. there would be an internal preprocessing that unpacks the tuple for the `set_figsize` call.\n\nSide-note: I've recently created #29612 to (partially) address the long-standing and much asked-for figure unit topic. One could expand that to `set_figsize()` later.\n\nDiscarded: When moving API anyway, one could consider going with `size` instead of `figsize`. That's shorter and `fig.set_size()` / `plt.figure(size=...)` would work well. However, it would be an even larger API break, and we cannot use that for `plt.subplots(..., size=...)`, because that would be too ambigous. Therefore `subplots(..., figsize=...)` must be kept. While we strictly don't need to have naming equivalence between `subplots()` and `figure` concerning this parameter, overall it's not worth it, so let's stick to `figsize` everywhere.\n\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/timhoffm","@type":"Person","name":"timhoffm"},"datePublished":"2025-02-17T11:00:15.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":0},"url":"https://github.com/29635/matplotlib/issues/29635"}