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Box zoom would need to be added to Vega-Lite first, and there has been some discussion around it in https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/issues/4742. Bottom line is that there's nothing blocking its implementation, someone just needs to do the work in Vega-Lite. And once released in Vega-Lite, Altair would pick it up automatically with how we generate the Altair API from the Vega-Lite schema.
https://github.com/medialab/ipysigma
(Disclaimer: I'm a Vega-Altair maintainer)
Thanks for the feedback and for the kind words! All of these drawbacks are fair, just a couple of comments.
There is an experimental package called altair_tiles that makes is possible to add OSM-style maptile backgrounds to Altair charts. See https://github.com/altair-viz/altair_tiles. This is mostly for static charts at the moment, as it doesn't integrate well with pan/zoom yet.
As you mentioned, VegaFusion is able to remove unused columns in most cases. (And if it doesn't for a particular case, please open an issue!).
(a current Altair maintainer and a former plotly.py maintainer here)
Plotly is definitely a great option as well, and it can do a bunch of things Vega-Altair is not designed for. One comment, just in case you weren't aware, is that there is a relatively new library that provides good integration between Altair and Dash: https://github.com/altair-viz/dash-vega-components. It even makes it possible to access Altair selection states in Dash callbacks so that you can have other dashboard components respond to selections.
Have you seen https://github.com/jonmmease/avenger? Which is an experimental Vega visualization renderer in Rust using wgpu.
I love Vega(-lite) / Altair, the grammar of graphics plotting system is really great to build any kind of chart even when it wasn't thought through by the authors of the library. There are other wrappers for languages that lack viz libraries, such as Elixir / Livebook [0]
However, when I used it a couples years back it struggled with large vizs, I think due to Vega(-lite)'s way of embedding the data in the viz artifact.
Also, interactive is nice but often I just need a quick static plot, and matplotlib is more convenient for this, you can easily see the png in any environment etc.
These days I'm eager to see an Observable Plot [1] wrapper for Python !
[0] https://github.com/livebook-dev/vega_lite
[1] https://github.com/observablehq/plot
I love Vega(-lite) / Altair, the grammar of graphics plotting system is really great to build any kind of chart even when it wasn't thought through by the authors of the library. There are other wrappers for languages that lack viz libraries, such as Elixir / Livebook [0]
However, when I used it a couples years back it struggled with large vizs, I think due to Vega(-lite)'s way of embedding the data in the viz artifact.
Also, interactive is nice but often I just need a quick static plot, and matplotlib is more convenient for this, you can easily see the png in any environment etc.
These days I'm eager to see an Observable Plot [1] wrapper for Python !
[0] https://github.com/livebook-dev/vega_lite
[1] https://github.com/observablehq/plot
Feel free to open an issue to let us know which parts of the documentation you find obscure and if you have suggestions for how to improve them. We did a larger overhaul a few months back and are always open to feedback on how to improve it further! https://altair-viz.github.io/
(disclaimer: I'm a co-maintainer of Altair)