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

This technique is usually used for multiple axis in a figure. In this context it is often required to have a colorbar that corresponds in size with the result from imshow. This can be achieved easily with the axes grid tool kit:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import make_axes_locatable

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

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
divider = make_axes_locatable(ax)
cax = divider.append_axes('right', size='5%', pad=0.05)

im = ax.imshow(data, cmap='bone')

fig.colorbar(im, cax=cax, orientation='vertical')
plt.show()