ggplot2

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2013–2024), in 6 threads.

People raised many different problems with ggplot2, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Ggplot becomes practically unusable as data sizes grow large2024-06-28
Per-function docs are hard to use; parameters are scattered, gaps only visible with specific terminology2022-03-22
Layer() docs restate names, circular ... argument, no pointers onward, confusing to navigate2022-03-22
Major update breaks existing code with confusing errors, forcing rework of past plots2015-12-26
Faceted scatterplots with thousands of points take seconds to render, wasting time during exploration2015-12-24
Customizing plot style beyond minor tweaks is extremely painful2015-12-22
Plots render slowly when interacting with the library2015-12-22
Default theme is cluttered, grey background and pastel colors hard to read and print2014-11-06
Hiding axis units requires an explicit setting that is very unintuitive2014-01-24
Commenter struggled with and found the R syntax really confusing2013-10-14