Gonna reiterate what I said in #24340 (comment) that I think this could work as part of an example in the colors section of the gallery given we don't really have standalone examples of using the new registry dictionary.

While I like your video and it's on my to-do list to share to all the places, I still really don't think this works as a colormap option. Like folks said in #24340, 'random' indicates the name of a colormap, so using it to trigger a random colormap creates an inconsistency in the API. We had a really similar discussion around using 'None' to get viridis and settled on a new method in #24111 to keep consistency. Not that I think you should add a random method to a dictionary like object - like with 'random' that's not really what it's for - the colormap registry object exists to store colormaps in an easily retrievable deterministic way.

Eta: sorry should have read the PR a bit closer, but I'm still not sold that the maintenance cost of this being in the library is worth it. Like if we take it, and currently there's no support for it so please don't do anymore work, it would need the what's new and the version added and tests and all that overhead cause that's how stuff works here. I think for the person this is for, they might honestly probably be more likely to discover it in a gallery example than buried in the colormap API anyway.

@augustvanhout thanks so much for your enthusiasm! However, maybe the level of consensus wasn't clear in #24340 because only two maintainers directly engaged. I am also strongly against this. I think if anyone disagreed with @timhoffm about closing the PR, we would have said. Hopefully we hear from you again, perhaps with a cool example as suggested by @story645

I’ll find some bugs to stomp… and maybe someday invent something more nuanced!

Turning this PR into a documentation PR is mostly the same code you used to make your video, but placed in https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/tree/main/examples/color

@jklymak agreed that the example idea could work and for most docs you need one maintainer in agreement (here you've kinda got two) and nobody in opposition so far.

I agree with @jklymak and @story645 . This will likely be good as an example, but is not something we want to ship as a function in the core library. It is better to document how to use the standard library function tools to do this and special casing the string "random" to mean "pick a random color map of the registered ones" not "a color map named 'random' which has been registered" is a big conceptual change.

Thank you again for you work and enthusiasm, but I am going to close this PR. If you are still interested in working on this please follow up with a documentation PR as both Hannah and Jody have suggested.