When generating a Matplotlib line or scatter plot, what axis attribute specifies the spacing between ticks? I do not want to explicitly specify where each tick should be as prompted by this related question

ax.ticks(np.arange(-100, 100, 5))

What is the matplotlib axis attribute that controls the tick spacing? It should behave something like the following.

ax.set_x_tick_spacing(5)

This would use the same default xlim and origin point (usually 0) as the default settings.

A more recent answer to the related question illustrates using the matplotlib.ticker.MultipleLocator object. The axis ticks are this type of matplotlib object. Here is an example of it's use.

ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(matplotlib.ticker.MultipleLocator(5))

will place ticks 5 units apart on the x-axis, and

ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(matplotlib.ticker.MultipleLocator(1))

will place minor ticks 1 unit apart on the x-axis.

Here is an example from the matplotlib Plotting Cookbook

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlibX = np.linspace(-15, 15, 1024)
Y = np.sinc(X)ax = plt.axes()
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(matplotlib.ticker.MultipleLocator(5))
ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(matplotlib.ticker.MultipleLocator(1))plt.plot(X, Y, c = 'k')
plt.show()