How to find the matplotlib style name?

Matplotlib provides several built-in styles to customize the appearance of your plots. To find all available matplotlib style names, you can use the plt.style.library attribute which returns a dictionary containing all available styles and their configurations.

Using plt.style.library

The plt.style.library returns a dictionary where keys are style names and values are their complete configuration parameters ?

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

print(plt.style.library)

{'bmh': RcParams({'axes.edgecolor': '#bcbcbc',
  'axes.facecolor': '#eeeeee',
  'axes.grid': True,
  'axes.labelsize': 'large',
  'axes.prop_cycle': cycler('color', ['#348ABD', '#A60628', '#7A68A6', '#467821', '#D55E00', '#CC79A7', '#56B4E9', '#009E73', '#F0E442', '#0072B2']),
  'axes.titlesize': 'x-large',
  'grid.color': '#b2b2b2',
  'grid.linestyle': '--',
  'grid.linewidth': 0.5,
  ...}),
 'classic': RcParams({'_internal.classic_mode': True,
  'agg.path.chunksize': 0,
  'animation.bitrate': -1,
  ...}),
 'seaborn-v0_8': RcParams({'axes.axisbelow': True,
  'axes.edgecolor': '#f0f0f0',
  'axes.facecolor': '#f0f0f0',
  'axes.grid': True,
  ...})}

Getting Only Style Names

If you only want the style names without their configuration details, you can extract the dictionary keys ?

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Get only the style names
style_names = list(plt.style.library.keys())
print("Available styles:")
for style in style_names:
    print(f"  - {style}")

Available styles:
  - bmh
  - classic
  - dark_background
  - fast
  - fivethirtyeight
  - ggplot
  - grayscale
  - seaborn-v0_8
  - seaborn-v0_8-bright
  - seaborn-v0_8-colorblind
  - seaborn-v0_8-dark
  - seaborn-v0_8-dark-palette
  - seaborn-v0_8-darkgrid
  - seaborn-v0_8-deep
  - seaborn-v0_8-muted
  - seaborn-v0_8-notebook
  - seaborn-v0_8-paper
  - seaborn-v0_8-pastel
  - seaborn-v0_8-poster
  - seaborn-v0_8-talk
  - seaborn-v0_8-ticks
  - seaborn-v0_8-white
  - seaborn-v0_8-whitegrid
  - Solarize_Light2
  - tableau-colorblind10
  - _classic_test_patch

Using plt.style.available

Alternatively, you can use plt.style.available which directly returns a list of available style names ?

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

print("Available matplotlib styles:")
print(plt.style.available)

Available matplotlib styles:
['bmh', 'classic', 'dark_background', 'fast', 'fivethirtyeight', 'ggplot', 'grayscale', 'seaborn-v0_8', 'seaborn-v0_8-bright', 'seaborn-v0_8-colorblind', 'seaborn-v0_8-dark', 'seaborn-v0_8-dark-palette', 'seaborn-v0_8-darkgrid', 'seaborn-v0_8-deep', 'seaborn-v0_8-muted', 'seaborn-v0_8-notebook', 'seaborn-v0_8-paper', 'seaborn-v0_8-pastel', 'seaborn-v0_8-poster', 'seaborn-v0_8-talk', 'seaborn-v0_8-ticks', 'seaborn-v0_8-white', 'seaborn-v0_8-whitegrid', 'Solarize_Light2', 'tableau-colorblind10', '_classic_test_patch']

Conclusion

Use plt.style.available to get a clean list of style names, or plt.style.library to access both style names and their complete configuration parameters. These styles can be applied using plt.style.use('style_name') to customize your plot appearance.