Sorting of alt.Columns should be similar to alt.Colors?

While trying to apply a custom ordering to the columns chart spec here:

logplot = alt.Chart(dataset_curated).mark_bar().encode(
        alt.X('technology:N', scale=alt.Scale(rangeStep=15), axis=alt.Axis(title='')),
        y = 'log:Q',
        color = alt.Color('sample:N'),
        column = 'chromosome:N'
        #column = alt.Column('chromosome:N', sort=alt.SortField(order=chr_array))
)

The column strings seem to be ordered lexicographically, not ideal for i.e, chromosomes:

So my pandas Categorical ordering, which works for raw dataframe ordering (chromosomes ordered by array’s positions):

chr_array = ['chr'+str(x) for x in range(1,23)]
chr_array.append('chrX')
chr_array.append('chrY')
chr_array.append('chrM')

dataset_curated["chromosome"] = pd.Categorical(dataset_curated["chromosome"], chr_array)
dataset_curated = dataset_curated.sort_values("chromosome")

Is ignored by Altair’s column ordering :_/ Also, according to the API reference for alt.Column, that only supports ascending and descending sort= arguments, unlike i.e alt.Colors which supports a manually ordered List(String).

I’m currently trying to figure out some workaround while reading through https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/245, https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/pull/899, https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/898 and https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/397, I just wanted this usecase to be noted 😉

[jakevdp]

For jupyter notebook, you need to update ipyvega.

For jupyterlab, vega-lite is bundled with jupyterlab itself. If you update to the most recent version of jupyterlab you’ll get the most recent version of the vega-lite renderer.

If you go back and forth between both, you’ll need to update both.

[jan-matthis]

I ran into the same issue as @andreipoe. To save the next person from searching – there are two issues in Vega-Lite that seem related:

• https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/issues/5937
• https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/issues/5366