Should imshow display a grid by default when under seaborn style?

Currently, if seaborn is imported, imshow will overlay a white grid over its image: $ python -c 'from pylab import *; import seaborn; imshow(rand(20, 20)); show()' I feel that if one is calling directly imshow, rather than some higher level method in seaborn, it is more likely that one is just trying to plot some real image data and does not want the grid. Is there a way to avoid adding the grid for such plots? (other than wrapping each call using set_style…)

[mwaskom]

You can also use axes_style in a with statement, which will at least save you one line of code per plot:

with sns.axes_style("white"):
    plt.imshow(x)

[mwaskom]

Well, that’s expected behavior. I don’t know why matplotlib draws imshow the way it does, but one way to avoid this is to set the zorder of the image to something greater than 0, should should put it over the grid.