Also matplotlib recently added stylesheets http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html which gets you ~75% of

Also matplotlib recently added stylesheets http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html http://matplotlib.org/users/style_sheets.html which gets you ~75% of the way there to ggplot style plots. I've found a number of edge cases where the plots don't turn out right when using the ggplot sheet. BUT the important part is you can set your own default plotting style with a single line of code and keep everything nice and pythonic (well kind of pythonic since you're using matplotlib...)