"Continuous" colormap

If you want to cycle through N colors from a "continous" colormap, like e.g. the default viridis map, the solution by @Gerges works nicely.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

N = 6
plt.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] = plt.cycler("color", plt.cm.viridis(np.linspace(0,1,N)))

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i in range(N):
    ax.plot([0,1], [i, 2*i])

plt.show()

"Discrete" colormap

Matplotlib provides a few colormap that are "discrete" in the sense that they hold some low number of distinct colors for qualitative visuals, like the tab10 colormap. To cycle through such colormap, the solution might be to not use N but just port all colors of the map to the cycler.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] = plt.cycler("color", plt.cm.tab20c.colors)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i in range(15):
    ax.plot([0,1], [i, 2*i])

plt.show()

Note that only ListedColormaps have the .colors attribute, so this only works for those colormap, but not e.g. the jet map.

Combined solution

The following is a general purpose function that takes a colormap as input and outputs a corresponding cycler. I originally proposed this solution in this matplotlib issue.

from matplotlib.pyplot import cycler
import numpy as np
from matplotlib.colors import LinearSegmentedColormap, ListedColormap
import matplotlib.cm

def get_cycle(cmap, N=None, use_index="auto"):
    if isinstance(cmap, str):
        if use_index == "auto":
            if cmap in ['Pastel1', 'Pastel2', 'Paired', 'Accent',
                        'Dark2', 'Set1', 'Set2', 'Set3',
                        'tab10', 'tab20', 'tab20b', 'tab20c']:
                use_index=True
            else:
                use_index=False
        cmap = matplotlib.cm.get_cmap(cmap)
    if not N:
        N = cmap.N
    if use_index=="auto":
        if cmap.N > 100:
            use_index=False
        elif isinstance(cmap, LinearSegmentedColormap):
            use_index=False
        elif isinstance(cmap, ListedColormap):
            use_index=True
    if use_index:
        ind = np.arange(int(N)) % cmap.N
        return cycler("color",cmap(ind))
    else:
        colors = cmap(np.linspace(0,1,N))
        return cycler("color",colors)

Usage for the "continuous" case:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
N = 6
plt.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] = get_cycle("viridis", N)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i in range(N):
    ax.plot([0,1], [i, 2*i])

plt.show()

Usage for the "discrete" case

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] = get_cycle("tab20c")

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for i in range(15):
    ax.plot([0,1], [i, 2*i])

plt.show()