Theming

Gufo ships three built-in themes and a composable system for creating custom themes.

Built-in themes

Name	Description
gufo_modern	Default. Light gray axes background, no spines, white grid lines.
gufo_dark	Dark navy background. Suited for dark-mode notebooks and presentations.
gufo_print	White background, serif font, grayscale palette. Print and publication safe.

Set a global theme

Applies to all charts created after the call.

import gufo

gufo.set_theme("gufo_dark")

# All subsequent charts use the dark theme
gufo.chart(df).scatter("x", "y").show()

Reset to the default at any time:

gufo.set_theme("gufo_modern")

Per-chart theme

Apply a theme to one chart without affecting global state.

gufo.chart(df).theme("gufo_dark").scatter("x", "y").show()

Temporary theme with a context manager

Use gufo.theme_context() to scope a theme to a block of code.

with gufo.theme_context("gufo_print"):
    gufo.chart(df).scatter("x", "y").save("print_ready.pdf")

# Global theme is unchanged after the block exits

Custom themes

Themes are immutable objects. Create a new theme by merging overrides onto an existing one, then registering it by name.

my_theme = (
    gufo.get_theme("gufo_modern")
    .merge({
        "axes.facecolor": "#1a1a2e",
        "figure.facecolor": "#16213e",
    })
    .rename("brand_dark")
)

gufo.register_theme(my_theme)
gufo.set_theme("brand_dark")

merge() returns a new Theme — the original is not modified.

Any matplotlib rcParam key is valid in merge(). See the matplotlib rcParams reference for the full list of available keys.

API reference

See gufo.style.theme.