It is with heavy heart that I announce that I am no longer actively developing prettyplotlib. It was a fantastic experience to bundle up that piece of code and share it with the world, and discover that there are many other people who want pretty plots. Over the last year, I discovered a much better visualization library in Python called seaborn, which is much more mature and covers more ground than prettyplotlib ever could. From working on clustered heatmaps on seaborn, I’ve become a much better Python programmer, and am forever grateful to Michael Waskom for creating it.

Using seaborn, to get the prettyplotlib style, do:

import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style='ticks', palette='Set2')

And to remove “chartjunk”, do:

sns.despine()

If you have discrete pull requests, I will accept them, but I personally will no longer fix bugs.

Thank you to all the prettyplotlib users, especially Phillip Guo for tweeting about it and setting off the publicity storm, and all the contributors who took my measly code and made it great. I’ve learned so much from the Python open source community and am so thankful that it is so easy to learn from others in this wonderful environment.

If you want to check out what I’ve been working on instead, take a look at flotilla, the package I’ve been working on with Michael Lovci for reproducible single-cell analysis. The package is still in its infancy (read: be prepared for bugs), and we are actively developing it!