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{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Idea: Reducing verbosity through more compact API patterns","articleBody":"### Summary\n\nMatplotlib is often considered verbose. I've been pondering whether/how one could write the code more compact without completely reinventing our API. The two main points for simplification I've come up with are:\n\n- Don't use `set_*` for configuration, but instead do the configuration via kwargs. The `set_*` methods can be a fallback for mor complex configuration.\n- Don't hold a figure reference as it's rarely needed.\n\nWhat I explicitly do not want to change:\n- No breakage of existing API\n- No completely new interface namespace\n- No method chaining\n\nThis is just an early and wild idea, not a proposal. Thoughts and feedback are welcome.\n\n\n\n\n\n### Proposed fix\n\nThe ideas are illustrated on a slightly modified variant of https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/gallery/lines_bars_and_markers/simple_plot.html\n\nThe formal Axes interface approach is:\n\n```python\nfig, ax = plt.subplots()\nax.plot(t, s)\nax.set_xlabel('time (s)')\nax.set_ylabel('voltage (mV)')\nax.set_title('A simple plot')\nplt.show()\n```\n\nIn some parts, we already have replaced the individual setters by `ax.set(...)` with kwargs.\n```python\nfig, ax = plt.subplots()\nax.plot(t, s)\nax.set(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot')\nplt.show()\n```\n\n*Possible improvement 1:* Replace `ax.set(...)` by kwargs during Axes creation:\n```python\nfig, ax = plt.subplots(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot')\nax.plot(t, s)\nplt.show()\n```\n\n*Possible improvement 2:* Don't store a reference to the figure - rationale: The `fig, ax = plt.subplots()` pattern is quite boilerplate and you rarely need the figure. One can always get the figure via `ax.get_figure()` if needed, which is only mildy more work than holding a `fig` variable.\n\n```python\nax = plt.figure().subplots(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot')\nax.plot(t, s)\nplt.show()\n```\nWhat is still not so nice is that you still need the `plt.figure().subplots(` chaining for the simple single-Axes case. While \n```python\nax = plt.axes(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot')\n```\nworks with the same result, there's a caveat in that `plt.axes()` reuses an existing Figure if possible whereas `plt.figure().subplot()` always creates a new figure. That's a potential footgun and we may want to think whether there's a way around this. Otherwise\n```python\nax = plt.axes(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot')\nax.plot(t, s)\nplt.show()\n```\nwould look quite clean to me:\n- create an Axes with some properties set\n- add data\n- show\n\nIn jupyter notebooks you'd even not need the show and could (as an abbreviation, not as a universally recommended pattern) create the plot in one line:\n```python\nplt.axes(xlabel='time (s)', ylabel='voltage (mV)', title='A simple plot').plot(t, s)\n```\n\n\n\n\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/timhoffm","@type":"Person","name":"timhoffm"},"datePublished":"2026-01-07T14:24:56.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":7},"url":"https://github.com/30941/matplotlib/issues/30941"}