Adding white breaks to bars in pyplot histogram

Question

I'd like to add white 'breaks' to the bars of my histograms in matplotlib, so the grid lines appear to continue through the plot without being intrusive or busy in the background. I'd like to to look something like the following:

What I want - https://i.stack.imgur.com/rzbEz.jpg

Here is a test histogram to work with:

vals = np.random.randn(1000)
f = plt.figure(figsize=[4,4])
ax = f.add_subplot(111)
ax.hist(vals, bins=20, normed=True)

Looks like you want to [add grid lines](https://stackoverflow.com/a/9149619/198633) — inspectorG4dget, Sep 12 '17 at 17:53
@inspectorG4dget I don't want the full gridlines, though - I just want small visual breaks in the bars of the histogram where the gridlines would be. I find full background grids too visually busy. — Tim, Sep 12 '17 at 18:50

PabTorre · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-13T15:38:22.410

If you make the grid lines the same color as the background and manage the horizontal and vertical independently, then you can get the "visual breaks" you want.

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
vals = np.random.randn(1000)
f = plt.figure(figsize=\[4,4\])
ax = f.add_subplot(111)
ax.hist(vals, bins=20, normed=True, 
        )
ax.yaxis.grid(which="major", color='white', linestyle='-', linewidth=0.5)
ax.xaxis.grid(which="major", color='white', linestyle='-', linewidth=4)

plt.show()]

Adding white breaks to bars in pyplot histogram

1 Answers1