PR Summary

I think if the user asks for the tick labels, they should be allowed to waste a few cpu cycles actually getting the tick labels rather than forcing a whole draw. However, its possible I don't understand some subtlety.

Ref: #6103. Probably a lot more, and many stack overflow issues.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(range(10))
labels = ax.xaxis.get_majorticklabels()
print(labels)

Current behaviour

[Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')]

Proposed behaviour

[Text(-2.0, 0, '−2'), Text(0.0, 0, '0'), Text(2.0, 0, '2'), Text(4.0, 0, '4'), Text(6.0, 0, '6'), Text(8.0, 0, '8'), Text(10.0, 0, '10')]

PR Checklist

Tests and Styling

• Has pytest style unit tests (and pytest passes).
• Is Flake 8 compliant (install flake8-docstrings and run flake8 --docstring-convention=all).

Documentation

• New features are documented, with examples if plot related.
• New features have an entry in doc/users/next_whats_new/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).
• API changes documented in doc/api/next_api_changes/ (follow instructions in README.rst there).
• Documentation is sphinx and numpydoc compliant (the docs should build without error).