Default legend font
After a while of playing around with the option inspector, I've managed to change the default font and colour of the axis labels and tick labels of a 2D plot, as well as the default colour of the axes:
However, the font of the legend has eluded me. Is there a way to change the default (so that I don't have to manually specify the font every time)?
Default plot colours
In a similar vein, is it possible to change the default function-plot colours? The default blue-orange-green-scheme is not to my liking.
Default plot range padding
Finally, why does the PlotRangePadding option in the option inspector not work? I've set it to None (also tried 0 earlier), and it doesn't seem to do anything (I've made sure I'm changing the global preferences):
Explanatory note
What I'd like to do is change the default options so that plots look the way I want them to in all future documents, forever, without me having to specify options unless I want a specific plot to look a specific way. I don't want to create a custom theme which I can then call into the options for Plot or Plot3D or ListPlot or whatever, because that means I have to type the theme-related stuff (i.e. more than zero characters) into the graphics options every time.
As stated by ArgentoSapiens in a comment on another question, "I [...] mean that there should be zero clicks or keystrokes between creating a new document and making a plot with the desired default [appearance]." Additionally, "behavio[u]r on other people's computers doesn't matter"; I only wish to change how things are displayed on my computer.
$PlotThemein your init file. This gives you the desired default appearance together with the nice properties of a theme (merging of settings etc) $\endgroup$$PlotThemein yourinit.mfile to the desired value. That way, the default plot theme will be whatever you choose. And if you define your custom theme in theinit.mfile as well, you'll have to do no extra typing at all $\endgroup$