R ggplot remove x ticks/titles without removing the space left for them

Question

In ggplot, it is often the case that I will want to create a multiplot using grid.arrange() and arrangeGrob() where axis labels are redundant. Take for example the following figure:

data = data.frame(x=1:50, y=50:1)
p1=ggplot(data, aes(x=x, y=y)) + geom_line() + xlab("Dimension") + ylab("Magnitude")
p2=ggplot(data, aes(x=x, y=-y)) + geom_line() + xlab("Dimension") + ylab("Magnitude")
grid.arrange(p1, p2, nrow=1)

It is clear that the label "Dimenion" and "Magnitude" are redundant on the rightmost plot.

I know i can easily remove the ticks, labels, and titles:

p2=p2 +
    theme(axis.title.x=element_blank(),
          axis.text.x=element_blank(),
          axis.ticks.x=element_blank(),
          axis.title.y=element_blank(),
          axis.text.y=element_blank(),
          axis.ticks.y=element_blank())
grid.arrange(p1, p2, nrow=1)

But this leaves me with the margins crushed on the second figure. I know I could do this manually by going through scale_x_continuous and scale_y_continuous, and instead of just replacing them with blanks like I do via theme(), I could manually set everything to "", but this is time consuming and requires somewhat of a less automated approach to doing it like element_blank().

Is there a similarly trivial way to remove the labels, without crushing the space they previously occupied? Something like element blank without the "assigns no space" aspect.

Answer 1

Like so?

#devtools::install_github("thomasp85/patchwork")
library(patchwork)
p1 + p2

Don't ask me how the magic works. You can read more about the functionality here: github.com/thomasp85/patchwork