Description
Summary
Currently, the Tick constructor smashes together kwargs specific to it, kwargs for the tickmarkers, for the labels, and for the gridline:
def __init__(
self, axes, loc, *, # global
size=None, # tickmarker property
width=None, # tickmarker property
color=None, # global
tickdir=None, # tickmarker (not a property)
pad=None, # global
labelsize=None, # label property
labelcolor=None, # label property
labelfontfamily=None, # label property
zorder=None, # global
gridOn=None, # gridline (property: ~visible)
tick1On=True, # tick (property, but specific to each tick)
tick2On=True, # tick (property, but specific to each tick)
label1On=True, # label (property, but specific to each label)
label2On=False, # label (property, but specific to each label)
major=True, # global
labelrotation=0, # label property
grid_color=None, # grid property
grid_linestyle=None, # grid property
grid_linewidth=None, # grid property
grid_alpha=None, # grid property
**kwargs, # grid properties
):The remaining kwargs are implicitly assumed to all start with "grid_" and further interpreted as grid properties (via grid_kw = {k[5:]: v for k, v in kwargs.items()}) -- note that this prefix is internally added by Axis.grid() to kwargs passed to it.
Proposed fix
We should at least check whether remaining kwargs indeed start with "grid_" and error out if that's not the case (Probably few people actually manually construct Ticks, but Tick(abcdecolor="k")) should certainly not be interpreted as Tick(grid_color="k") anyways.)
It may make sense to try to group the kwargs a bit more and not try to repeat all relevant properties in the Tick constructor, e.g. (not writing out the defaults)
def __init__(
self, axes, loc, *,
major, tickdir, pad, color, zorder, # global
tick_props, tick1On, tick2On, # tick properties
label_props, label1On, label2On, # label properties
grid_props, # grid properties
):(probably kwargs could be normalized in this form as soon as one populates Axis._major_tick_kw/_minor_tick_kw)
Inspired by #25910.