Python hide ticks but show tick labels

Question

I can remove the ticks with

ax.set_xticks([]) 
ax.set_yticks([]) 

but this removes the labels as well. Any way I can plot the tick labels b

Answer 1

matplotlib.pyplot.setp(*args, **kwargs) is used to set properties of an artist object. You can use this in addition to get_xticklabes() to make it invisible.

something on the lines of the following

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(2,1,1)
ax.set_xlabel("X-Label",fontsize=10,color='red')
plt.setp(ax.get_xticklabels(),visible=False)

Below is the reference page http://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_api.html

Answer 2

You can set the yaxis and xaxis set_ticks_position properties so they just show on the left and bottom sides, respectively.

ax.yaxis.set_ticks_position('left')
ax.xaxis.set_ticks_position('bottom')

Furthermore, you can hide the spines as well by setting the set_visible property of the specific spine to False.

axes[i].spines['right'].set_visible(False)
axes[i].spines['top'].set_visible(False)

Answer 3

Thanks for your answers @julien-spronck and @cmidi.
As a note, I had to use both methods to make it work:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, (ax1, ax2, ax3) = plt.subplots(1, 3, figsize=(11, 3))

data = np.random.random((4, 4))

ax1.imshow(data)
ax1.set(title='Bad', ylabel='$A_y$')
# plt.setp(ax1.get_xticklabels(), visible=False)
# plt.setp(ax1.get_yticklabels(), visible=False)
ax1.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', length=0)

ax2.imshow(data)
ax2.set(title='Somewhat OK', ylabel='$B_y$')
plt.setp(ax2.get_xticklabels(), visible=False)
plt.setp(ax2.get_yticklabels(), visible=False)
# ax2.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', length=0)

ax3.imshow(data)
ax3.set(title='Nice', ylabel='$C_y$')
plt.setp(ax3.get_xticklabels(), visible=False)
plt.setp(ax3.get_yticklabels(), visible=False)
ax3.tick_params(axis='both', which='both', length=0)

plt.show()