Changing legend names without changing colors in ggplot2

Question

I would like to rename the values in a legend without altering the custom colors that have already been set. Is there a way to set legend labels without using scale_color_manual

Answer 1

It is possible to specify the label names in scale_colour_manual.

ggplot(dat, aes(XValue, color = Distribution)) +
  stat_density(geom = "path", position = "identity", size = 2) +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("yellow", "black", "forestgreen"),
                     labels = c("Distribution 1",
                                "Distribution 2",
                                "Distribution 3"))

Answer 2

If you're willing to use a consistent color palette, then you could define this as:

    mycolors <- c("red", "blue", "black", #ee4747, #fff382, #f1f6c8, #334d65, #263825)

Now, instead of

    values = c("yellow", "black", "forestgreen")

use

    values = mycolors