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 but not the ticks and the spine

Answer 1

You can set the tick length to 0 using tick_params (http://matplotlib.org/api/axes_api.html#matplotlib.axes.Axes.tick_params):

fig = plt.figure() ax = fig.add_subplot(111) ax.plot([1],[1]) ax.tick_params(axis=u'both', which=u'both',length=0) plt.show() 

Answer 2

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()