How to do xticklabel with different major grid spacing

Question

How to plot a chart with minor grid of 1, major grid of 10, and with xticklabels increment 20 units?

Here is my sample code and output with xticklabels increment every 10 units:

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 10))
ax = plt.gca()
major_ticks = np.arange(0, 60, 10)    
minor_ticks = np.arange(0, 60, 1)
ax.set_xticks(major_ticks)
ax.set_xticks(minor_ticks, minor=True)
ax.set_yticks(major_ticks)
ax.set_yticks(minor_ticks, minor=True)
ax.grid(which='major')
ax.grid(which='minor', alpha=0.5)
ax.set_aspect('equal')

But then I wanted to display the xticklabels and yticklabels with the increment of 20 instead of 10, as shown here like this:

Any idea how to accomplish this? Thanks

Answer 1

Just add the following 4 lines to the end of your code: You just have to hide every second major tick label. That's pretty much it to get what you want. [1::2] indexing means start from the second index and take every second element from there. I have to start from the second index because the tick label at the first index is 0 which you do not want to remove.

EDIT: IF you just want the major ticks at the locations where you have tick labels, you can do the following modifications (marked by an arrow <---). Yo might find the official docs helpful.

Plot without the major ticks but with minor ticks

# Hiding for x-axis
for t in ax.xaxis.get_major_ticks()[1::2]:
    t.label.set_visible(False)
    t.tick1On = False # <----

# Hiding for y-axis
for t in ax.yaxis.get_major_ticks()[1::2]:
    t.label.set_visible(False)    
    t.tick1On = False # <----

Plot without the minor and major ticks

If you also want to hide the minor ticks, you can do the following in addition to the above code

for t in ax.xaxis.get_minor_ticks():
    t.tick1On = False
    # t._apply_params(width=0) # suggested by Jayjayyy

for t in ax.yaxis.get_minor_ticks():
    t.tick1On = False     
    # t._apply_params(width=0) # suggested by Jayjayyy

The direct way avoiding all for loops is as suggested by Jayjayyy

ax.tick_params(axis='both', which='minor', width=0)