Cartesian coordinates with x and y flipped

This function is superseded because in many cases, coord_flip() can easily be replaced by swapping the x and y aesthetics, or optionally setting the orientation argument in geom and stat layers.

coord_flip() is useful for geoms and statistics that do not support the orientation setting, and converting the display of y conditional on x, to x conditional on y.

coord_flip(xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL, expand = TRUE, clip = "on")

Arguments

xlim, ylim: Limits for the x and y axes.
expand: If TRUE, the default, adds a small expansion factor to the limits to ensure that data and axes don't overlap. If FALSE, limits are taken exactly from the data or xlim/ylim.
clip: Should drawing be clipped to the extent of the plot panel? A setting of "on" (the default) means yes, and a setting of "off" means no. In most cases, the default of "on" should not be changed, as setting clip = "off" can cause unexpected results. It allows drawing of data points anywhere on the plot, including in the plot margins. If limits are set via xlim and ylim and some data points fall outside those limits, then those data points may show up in places such as the axes, the legend, the plot title, or the plot margins.

Details

Coordinate systems interact with many parts of the plotting system. You can expect the following for coord_flip():

It does not change the facet order in facet_grid() or facet_wrap().
The scale_x_*() functions apply to the vertical direction, whereas scale_y_*() functions apply to the horizontal direction. The same holds for the xlim and ylim arguments of coord_flip() and the xlim() and ylim() functions.
The x-axis theme settings, such as axis.line.x apply to the horizontal direction. The y-axis theme settings, such as axis.text.y apply to the vertical direction.

Examples

# The preferred method of creating horizontal instead of vertical boxplots
ggplot(diamonds, aes(price, cut)) +
  geom_boxplot()


# Using `coord_flip()` to make the same plot
ggplot(diamonds, aes(cut, price)) +
  geom_boxplot() +
  coord_flip()


# With swapped aesthetics, the y-scale controls the left axis
ggplot(diamonds, aes(y = carat)) +
  geom_histogram() +
  scale_y_reverse()
#> `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.


# In `coord_flip()`, the x-scale controls the left axis
ggplot(diamonds, aes(carat)) +
  geom_histogram() +
  coord_flip() +
  scale_x_reverse()
#> `stat_bin()` using `bins = 30`. Pick better value with `binwidth`.


# In line and area plots, swapped aesthetics require an explicit orientation
df <- data.frame(a = 1:5, b = (1:5) ^ 2)
ggplot(df, aes(b, a)) +
  geom_area(orientation = "y")


# The same plot with `coord_flip()`
ggplot(df, aes(a, b)) +
  geom_area() +
  coord_flip()