Quite a short post, rather a reminder for me maybe, hoping that it can help others saving a few precious minutes.

Problem

You have created a new virtualenv to work on your favorite code, but get tired to always specify the same options when saving a figure with matplotlib:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
...
plt.savefig(figname, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight', ...)

Solution

For each of the virtualenv you create (provided matplotlib is installed), there is a file called matplotlibrc that defines the different options. With my installation, I found it in the virtualenv directory, in the folder lib/python3.6/site-packages/matplotlib/mpl-data

In my case I will edit the following lines:

#figure.dpi       : 300      # figure dots per inch
#savefig.bbox     : tight    # 'tight' or 'standard'.