facet_wrap in altair?

I’d like to suggest the equivalent of ggplot2’s facet_wrap in altair.

Right now, it’s possible to have facets plot in a single column (.facet(row) or in a single column (.facet(column), or even as a grid, but often, it’s useful to just lay out a ribbon of charts one after another (not necessarily mapping a column or row to variables in the data frame) using more than one column/row. In other words, those that line up in a single column/row don’t mean anything in particular.

I asked this question on SO first to see if there was already a way to do this in altair, but it seems rather involved (i.e. not as slick as facet_wrap):

https://stackoverflow.com/a/50166485/2320823

[jakevdp]

This is now part of Altair as of version 3.0. For example:

import altair as alt
from vega_datasets import data

source = data.population.url

alt.Chart(source).mark_area().encode(
    x='age:O',
    y=alt.Y('sum(people):Q', title='Population'),
    facet=alt.Facet('year:O', columns=5)
).properties(
    width=100,
    height=80
)

[jakevdp]

FYI, vega-lite has added facet wrap: vega/vega-lite#4541

It will be part of the 3.0 release. Once that is out, we’ll make an Altair 3.0 release that will include facet wrap.