Interesting, thanks. A few questions from a newbie:

* I hadn't heard of ProPlot before. I take it that it's no longer maintained? Is there an announcement, or is it just obvious from commits drying up (like with PIL which was forked into Pillow)?

* Is this a (friendly) fork (again, as with PIL/Pillow), or a reimplementation (in which case are there big differences or does it aim to match)?

* I hadn't of GeoAxes either and that looks pretty useful. The top web search results for that term are ProPlot and Cartopy. Is the Cartopy implementation related at all? Is this a bundling of that, or a similar reimplementation, or something fairly different?

Thanks for your questions.

  - ProPlot appears to be unmaintained - I initially tried to push changes to make it compatible with matplotlib 3.9+ around mid-2024, but after repeatedly trying to contact the original owner through official and unofficial channels with no response, we decided to fork by the end of 2024. I had grown really fond of ProPlot and wanted to keep it alive.

  - This is currently a friendly fork, not a reimplementation. We're carrying on the torch that ProPlot set out with, adding features along the way and refactoring when necessary.

  - We implement a custom GeoAxes that allows for basemap and/or Cartopy as a backend. The GeoAxes object behaves similar to a normal axis, allowing direct plotting and manipulation without the user having to worry about projections.

To answer my own questions:

* Yes it seems ProPlot stagnated and no longer works with latest matplotlib versions. UltraPlot is a fork that fixes that:

https://github.com/proplot-dev/proplot/pull/459

* Yes, the documentation says that GeoAxes is from Cartopy.

(Also, typo: the project description says "succint" rather than "succinct".)