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should cm be renamed to colormaps? #1476
Description
It's a bit confusing to have a proper module have such a short, non-descriptive name.
Looking at code that uses it, if one were to see from matplotlib import cm - they'd be left wondering what those two letters could possibly stand for. Then further down, they'd see it being used with a keyword argument that would shed some light, such as cmap = cm.RdBu, and they would maybe go through the steps of "oh, it's a map... probably a color map"...maybe...
If the import code was written as from matplotlib import colormaps as cm, it'd be more clear. We would retain the dangling plt.cm and have a dummy matplotlib.cm module which would just import everything from matplotlib.colormaps.
as a bonus, I think plt.colormaps should be retained, but the code and documentation for it should live inside this new colormaps module.
Activity
tacaswell commentedon Jan 16, 2014
👍 on doing this
petehuang commentedon Dec 29, 2016
This is still useful. In the meantime, the docs just need to make sure that any mention of colormap is accompanied by a note saying that the colormap module is indeed named
cm. I think this is done fine so far, but something to be aware of.Rename cm.py to colormaps.py.
efiring commentedon Apr 27, 2020
Too late. Not worth the disturbance. Decided in the devel meeting on 2020-04-27.