Setting default options for hvplots

Question

I would like to set default options for the plots generated by hvplots.

Normally in holoviews I would do this to set defaults for every plot:

import holoviews as hv
from holoviews import opts
hv.extension('bokeh')
opts.defaults(opts.Curve( height=400, width=900 ,show_grid=True))

Now that I'm using hvplots the import has become the following for xarray based plotting

import xarray as xr
import hvplot.xarray

If I have an xarray dataset and I want to plot one of the dimensions then I use this

ds.myDims.hvplot()

However this gives a plot with a default width and no grid lines. To add this I need to specify the options with the plot.

ds.myDims.hvplot(height=400, width=900,grid=True)

Ideally I'd like to set the height, width, grid etc globally, like I can in holoviews, so I don't have to specify it for every plot.

Mind filing a feature request for this on the hvPlot repo? I don't think there is currently any nice API for this. — philippjfr, Jul 01 '19 at 13:43
Submitted as [issue 231](https://github.com/pyviz/hvplot/issues/231). — Redlegjed, Jul 02 '19 at 01:24

Sander van den Oord · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-18T17:32:21.043

EDIT:

With hvplot >= 0.5 you can now set default settings for your plots as follows:

from holoviews import opts

opts.defaults(
    opts.Scatter(
        width=700, height=300, 
        color='black', 
        active_tools=['box_zoom'],
))

Alternative (older) solution:

Define your default settings in a dictionary and unpack that dictionary everytime you create plot:

default_settings = {'height': 400, 'width': 900}

plot = ds.myDims.hvplot(**default_settings)

another_plot = ds.myDims.hvplot(**default_settings)

Setting default options for hvplots

1 Answers1