How can I suppress the vertical gridlines in a ggplot2 plot while retaining the x-axis labels?

Question

This is a follow-on from this question, in which I was trying to suppress the vertical gridlines.

The solution, as provided by learnr, was to add scale_x_continuous(brea

Answer 1

Well I found this solution while googling for this problem. I have not tried it, yet.

http://wiki.stdout.org/rcookbook/Graphs/Axes%20(ggplot2)/

You have to scroll down a bit.

Best,

Felix

Answer 2

For people looking this up in 2020, I have found a solution in the form of the removeGrid function from the ggExtra library here rdrr.io > removeGrid

I have tested it to be working with ggplot2 version 3.3.0 and ggExtra version 0.9, giving me axis ticks without the gridlines.

Answer 3

The answers above will not work in ggplot2 version 0.9.2.1 and above. Fortunately, there is now an easier way to do this, as described in response to a different question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8992102/800044.

Answer 4

You can do this editing the grob directly, try:

grid.remove(gPath("panel.grid.minor.x.polyline"),grep=T)
grid.remove(gPath("panel.grid.major.x.polyline"),grep=T) 

It will strip off your vertical lines. I'm just having problems to use it inside a function, because I guess that it only works when the ggplot is printed.

But, if that's not your case and you'll just need the graphic, than it will work.

Answer 5

As code in comments does not display nicely, so I am posting this as an answer. You could do something like this and add labels manually with geom_text():

ggplot(data, aes(x, y)) +
        geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
        scale_x_continuous(breaks = NA) +
        opts(
                panel.grid.major = theme_line(size = 0.5, colour = '#1391FF'),
                panel.grid.minor = theme_blank(),
                panel.background = theme_blank(),
                axis.ticks = theme_blank()
        )+
        geom_text(aes(label = x, y = -.3))