This post is great---even just explaining the difference between figure and axis, and the multiple systems (and the wise recommendation to use the OO system), a

This post is great---even just explaining the difference between figure and axis, and the multiple systems (and the wise recommendation to use the OO system), and all the rest is gold---that stuff took me days of beating my head against the wall and searching through the matplotlib documentation to sort out. Honestly, for 99% of uses Seaborn is great, so long as you remember to use the latest version---for some reason, a lot of people seem to have 0.8.0 installed, and the api changed with 0.9.0. For uses beyond what Seaborn can do, I think that the best strategy is just to figure out a personal plotting language and then wrap that up into a personal library so you never have to think about that again. That's kind what I've done: I threw together a library to produce some basic figures that are suitable for printing,[1] and now I never have to think about those figures again. [1] https://github.com/paultopia/plottyprint https://github.com/paultopia/plottyprint