Display all x-axis labels on ggplot histogram

I have a simple frequency histogram for a data with 65k rows and here is the code I have with an example data:

data <- data.frame(var1=floor(6*rnorm(65000)  + 1))
data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=var1)) +
    geom_histogram(fill="lightblue", color="black", alpha=0.9, bins = 30) +
    theme(plot.title = element_text(size=15),
          axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5)) +
    stat_bin(geom="text", 
           colour="black",
           bins = 30,
           aes(label=..count..), 
           angle = 45, 
           vjust=-.5)

The plot has 30 bins but has 3 labels on x - axis:

I just want it to have a label for each bin.

I tried theme() and scale_x_cont() but they did not work and messed the whole plot. I don't want to change anything i just want to add labels on the x. Thank you!

A different approach to draw your histogram and at the same time allowing to add axis labels for each bin would be to use geom_bar with scale_x_binned:

library(ggplot2)

set.seed(123)

data <- data.frame(var1 = floor(6 * rnorm(200) + 1))

ggplot(data, aes(x = var1)) +
  geom_bar(fill = "lightblue", color = "black", alpha = 0.9) +
  stat_count(
    geom = "text",
    colour = "black",
    aes(label = after_stat(count)),
    angle = 45,
    vjust = 0,
    hjust = 0
  ) +
  scale_x_binned(n.breaks = 30, show.limits = TRUE) +
  theme(
    plot.title = element_text(size = 15),
    axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = .5)
  )

<!-- -->

One way could be using scale_x_continuous() with the breaks

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

data <- data.frame(var1 = floor(6 * rnorm(200) + 1))

data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x = var1)) +
  geom_histogram(fill = "lightblue", color = "black", alpha = 0.9, bins = 30) +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(size = 15),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5)) +
  stat_bin(
    geom = "text",
    colour = "black",
    bins = 30,
    aes(label = ..count..),
    angle = 45,
    vjust = -0.5
  ) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(min(data$var1), max(data$var1), by = 1))

You can use scale_x_continuous to modify how the x axis scale looks. You can change the number of breaks using n.breaks or adjust using breaks or labels. The documentation gives great detail, and this book is an awesome resource for understanding scales a bit better (and ggplot2 as a whole).

For your code, the answer looks like:

data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=var1)) +
    geom_histogram(fill="lightblue", color="black", alpha=0.9, bins = 30) +
    theme(plot.title = element_text(size=15),
          axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5)) +
    stat_bin(geom="text", 
           colour="black",
           bins = 30,
           aes(label=..count..), 
           angle = 45, 
           vjust=-.5) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(-17, 17, 1))

I would also add that ..count.. has been deprecated by ggplot2 3.4.0. Here is a little more info about the deprecation and the new approach. To avoid getting a warning, try:

data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=var1)) +
    geom_histogram(fill="lightblue", color="black", alpha=0.9, bins = 30) +
    theme(plot.title = element_text(size=15),
          axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5)) +
    stat_bin(geom="text", 
           colour="black",
           bins = 30,
           aes(label = after_stat(count)), 
           angle = 45, 
           vjust=-.5) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(-17, 17, 1))

From ?scale_x_continuous, the breaks argument can be one of

> NULL for no breaks
>
> waiver() for the default breaks computed by the transformation object
>
> A numeric vector of positions
>
> A function that takes the limits as input and returns breaks as output (e.g., a function returned by scales::extended_breaks()). Also accepts rlang lambda function notation.

Using the last option, we can make a simple function giving every integer in the axis:

data <- data.frame(var1=floor(6*rnorm(200)  + 1))
data %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=var1)) +
    geom_histogram(fill="lightblue", color="black", alpha=0.9, bins = 30) +
    theme(plot.title = element_text(size=15),
          axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5)) +
    stat_bin(geom="text", 
           colour="black",
           bins = 30,
           aes(label=..count..), 
           angle = 45, 
           vjust=-.5) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = function(range) floor(range[1]):ceiling(range[2]))