This answer mentions that either
fig = plt.figure()
fig.patch.set_facecolor('black')
or
plt.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = 'black'
will change the value in the rcParams dictionary for the key 'figure.facecolor'.
Suppose that my script has made several changes to the values in a nondeterministic way based on user interaction, and I want to undo all of that and go back to matplotlib's default parameters and behavior.
In the beginning of the script I could check matplotlib.rcParams and store either the whole dictionary, or values for certain keys, and then restore them one at a time or with the .update() method, but I don't know if that's wise because I don't know how else the matplotlib.RcParams instance is used (it's not just a dictionary). It does have a .setdefault() method but I can't understand what help returns on that:
Help on method setdefault in module collections.abc:
setdefault(key, default=None) method of matplotlib.RcParams instance
D.setdefault(k[,d]) -> D.get(k,d), also set D[k]=d if k not in D
Is there some kind of restore the original default values feature, or should I just wing-it by updating the whole thing with the copy that I've stored?
Per my understanding and answers to How to recover matplotlib defaults after setting stylesheet you should be able to do this:
import matplotlib
matplotlib.rcParams.update(matplotlib.rcParamsDefault)
You could also check the site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data folder for the file named matplotlibrc. It should have the entire default values there.