Set line colors according to colormap

It’s easiest to use a LineCollection for this. In fact, it expects the lines to be in a similar format to what you already have. To color the lines by a third variable, just specify the array=floats_list. As an example:

import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.collections import LineCollection

# The line format you curently have:
lines = [[(0, 1, 2, 3, 4), (4, 5, 6, 7, 8)],
         [(0, 1, 2, 3, 4), (0, 1, 2, 3, 4)],
         [(0, 1, 2, 3, 4), (8, 7, 6, 5, 4)],
         [(4, 5, 6, 7, 8), (0, 1, 2, 3, 4)]]

# Reformat it to what `LineCollection` expects:
lines = [zip(x, y) for x, y in lines]

z = np.array([0.1, 9.4, 3.8, 2.0])

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
lines = LineCollection(lines, array=z, cmap=plt.cm.rainbow, linewidths=5)
ax.add_collection(lines)
fig.colorbar(lines)

# Manually adding artists doesn't rescale the plot, so we need to autoscale
ax.autoscale()

plt.show()

There are two main advantages of this over repeatedly calling plot.

1. Rendering speed. Collections render much faster than a large number of similar artists.
2. It’s easier to color the data by another variable according to a colormap (and/or update the colormap later).