How to color entire background in ggplot2 when using coord_fixed

Question

When coord_fixed() is used with ggplot2, it does not appear to be possible to set the background color of the entire plot. Consider this simple example:

Answer 1

If you want to achieve this effect without relying on non-exported ggplot2 functions, you can also use ggdraw() from cowplot:

test_data <- data.frame(x=1:10)
test_data$y <- sqrt(test_data$x)
p1 <- ggplot(test_data) + geom_point(aes(x, y))
p2 <- p1 + theme(plot.background=element_rect(fill="green", color = NA)) + coord_fixed()

# note, don't load cowplot, since it may change your theme
cowplot::ggdraw(p2) + 
  theme(plot.background = element_rect(fill="green", color = NA))

The function ggdraw() wraps your plot into a new ggplot object that you can then draw onto or style as you wish.