Add colorbar to existing axis

Question

I\'m making some interactive plots and I would like to add a colorbar legend. I don\'t want the colorbar to be in its own axes, so I want to add it to the existing axes. I\'

Answer 1

The colorbar has to have its own axes. However, you can create an axes that overlaps with the previous one. Then use the cax kwarg to tell fig.colorbar to use the new axes.

For example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

data = np.arange(100, 0, -1).reshape(10, 10)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
cax = fig.add_axes([0.27, 0.8, 0.5, 0.05])

im = ax.imshow(data, cmap='gist_earth')
fig.colorbar(im, cax=cax, orientation='horizontal')
plt.show()