geom_hexbin(): hexes appear stretched?

[kevinushey]

Using this code, from the examples:

d <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(carat, price))
d + geom_hex()

It seems like the plotted hexagons are now "squished" improperly, according to the aspect ratio of the current device. For example:

Has it always been this way and I'm just misremembering? Or has something changed in how hexagonal bins are drawn?

Compare this with plots generated by e.g.

library(hexbin)
mixdata <-
  data.frame(x = c(rnorm(5000),rnorm(5000,4,1.5)),
             y = c(rnorm(5000),rnorm(5000,2,3)),
             a = gl(2, 5000))
hexbinplot(y ~ x, aspect = 2, data = mixdata)

[kevinushey]

> sessioninfo::session_info()
─ Session info ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
 os       macOS Sequoia 15.4.1
 system   aarch64, darwin20
 ui       RStudio
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       America/Los_Angeles
 date     2025-05-16
 rstudio  2025.08.0-hourly+75 Sandyland Bluebonnet (desktop)
 pandoc   3.6.4 @ /opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc
 quarto   1.7.29 @ /Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/Resources/app/quarto/bin/quarto

─ Packages ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package      * version date (UTC) lib source
 cli            3.6.5   2025-04-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 dplyr          1.1.4   2023-11-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
 farver         2.1.2   2024-05-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 generics       0.1.4   2025-05-09 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 ggplot2      * 3.5.2   2025-04-09 [1] RSPM
 glue           1.8.0   2024-09-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 gtable         0.3.6   2024-10-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 lifecycle      1.0.4   2023-11-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 magrittr       2.0.3   2022-03-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 pillar         1.10.2  2025-04-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 pkgconfig      2.0.3   2019-09-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 R6             2.6.1   2025-02-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 RColorBrewer   1.1-3   2022-04-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
 rlang          1.1.6   2025-04-11 [1] RSPM (R 4.4.2)
 rstudioapi     0.17.1  2024-10-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 scales         1.4.0   2025-04-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 sessioninfo    1.2.3   2025-02-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)
 tibble         3.2.1   2023-03-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
 tidyselect     1.2.1   2024-03-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
 vctrs          0.6.5   2023-12-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.0)
 withr          3.0.2   2024-10-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.4.1)

 [1] /Users/kevin/Library/R/arm64/4.4/library
 [2] /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.4-arm64/Resources/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

[thomasp85]

This has always been the case. The binning happens before ggplot2 knows anything about the aspect ratio of the plot and is not recalculated on resizing. So you'll need to use a coord_fixed() to ensure the hexagon is regular