Make tick_left/right keep labels off if they are already off

[jklymak]

PR Summary

This modifies XAxis.tick_left and X-axis.tick_right to keep the tick labels turned off if the major
labels are already turned off.

Not 100% convinced this is the right thing to do, but fixes #9664 Wild guess is that this doesn't break anything, whereas the new behaviour did.

Fixes:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f, axes = plt.subplots(1, 2, sharey=True)
axes[1].yaxis.tick_left()
plt.show()

Breaks:

The following if the user expected tick_left() to turn the labeling back on.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

f, ax = plt.subplots(1, 2)
ax.yaxis.set_tick_params(which='both', labelleft=False)
ax.yaxis.tick_left()
plt.show()

I'm not sure why this would happen, but this PR breaks that case...

PR Checklist

• Has Pytest style unit tests
• Code is PEP 8 compliant
• New features are documented, with examples if plot related
• Documentation is sphinx and numpydoc compliant
• Added an entry to doc/users/next_whats_new/ if major new feature (follow instructions in README.rst there)
• Documented in doc/api/api_changes.rst if API changed in a backward-incompatible way
• fix tick_top tick_bottom

[mwaskom]

Does this address the corresponding changes in tick_bottom/tick_top?

[jklymak]

@mwaskom Not yet - see todo list above...

Note its also not working yet

[mwaskom]

Note its also not working yet

details, details...

[dstansby]

This definitely needs a test!

[jklymak]

@dstansby the test is easy if this is the behaviour we want.

[efiring]

This looks reasonable as a fix for the regression. I suspect there is no perfect fix. The underlying problem is that our API is complicated and confusing, with too many ways to do some things, and a lack of clarity such as is illustrated by the original docstring 'use ticks only on top'.

[jklymak]

@efiring Yeah, I would actually be in favour of deprecating these functions due to their ambiguity. This PR at least tries to document the ambiguity, but its suboptimal. OTOH, the set_tick_params is pretty clear, if more syntactically verbose.

[efiring]

Deprecation sounds good to me! It's hard to imagine that these vague shorthand versions are used so often in interactive mode, where their brevity would be most advantageous.