title: matplotlib - change marker color along plot line
body: <p>I would like to plot a 2d data set with matplotlib such that the marker color for each data point is different. I found the example on multicolored lines (<a href="http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/multicolored_line.html">http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/multicolored_line.html</a>). However, this does not seem to work when plotting a line with markers. </p>
  
  <p>The solution I came up with individually plots every point:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import matplotlib.cm as cm
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import numpy as np
  
  # The data
  x = np.linspace(0, 10, 1000)
  y = np.sin(2 * np.pi * x)
  
  # The colormap
  cmap = cm.jet
  
  # Create figure and axes
  fig = plt.figure(1)
  fig.clf()
  ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
  
  # Plot every single point with different color
  for i in range(len(x)):
      c = cmap(int(np.rint(x[i] / x.max() * 255)))
      ax.plot(x[i], y[i], 'o', mfc=c, mec=c)
      ax.set_xlim([x[0], x[-1]])
      ax.set_ylim([-1.1, 1.1])
      ax.set_xlabel('x')
      ax.set_ylabel('y')
  
  plt.draw()
  plt.show()
  
  # Save the figure
  fig.savefig('changing_marker_color.png', dpi=80)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The resulting plot looks like as it should but the plotting gets really slow and I need it quite fast. Is there a clever trick to speed up the plotting?</p>