1. Introduction

ggstar provides geoms for ggplot2 to create more easily discernible shapes:

geom_star

p1 <- show_starshapes()
p1

And the default is: c(1, 13, 15, 11, 12, 14, 29, 2, 27)[seq_len(n)]. n is the number of shapes you want to use.

2. Install

ggstar has been submitted on CRAN, you can use the following to install it.

# Release
install.packages("ggstar")

# Or for devel
if(!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly=TRUE)){
    install.packages("remotes")
}
remotes::install_github("xiangpin/ggstar")

3. Usage

geom_star is similar to geom_point of ggplot2. The main difference is geom_star uses starshape to map the starshapes. Another is geom_star uses scale_starshape_manual for manual scaling. The shapes will not be distorted on cartesian coordinates or polar coordinates.

library(ggplot2)
library(ggstar)
p2 <- ggplot(data=iris, aes(x=Sepal.Width,y=Sepal.Length)) + 
      geom_star(aes(starshape=Species, fill=Species), size=2.5) +
      scale_fill_manual(values=c("#E41A1C", "#377EB8", "#4DAF4A")) +
      theme(legend.spacing.y = unit(0.02, "cm"))
p2

p3 <- ggplot(data=mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg)) +
      geom_star(aes(fill=cyl), size=2.5) +
      scale_fill_gradient(low="blue", high="red") +
      coord_polar() +
      theme(panel.border=element_blank(),
            legend.spacing.y = unit(0.02, "cm"))
p3

library(ggiraph)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggstar)
mtcars$name <- rownames(mtcars)
p4 <- ggplot(
        data = mtcars, 
        mapping = aes(
          x = wt, 
          y = mpg, 
          fill = cyl,
          tooltip = paste0("name: ", name,"\nqsec: ", qsec,"\ndrat: ",drat), 
          data_id = name
        )
      ) +
      geom_star_interactive(size = 3.5) +
      scale_fill_viridis_c()
      
girafe(
  ggobj = p4,
  options = list(
    opts_hover(css = "fill:yellow;stroke:black;stroke-width:1.5px;"),
    opts_zoom = opts_zoom(min = .7, max = 4),
    opts_tooltip(use_fill = TRUE),
    opts_sizing(width = .7),
    opts_toolbar = opts_toolbar(saveaspng = FALSE, delay_mouseout = 5000)
  )
)

4. Need helps?

If you have questions/issues, please visit github issue tracker.

5. Session information

Here is the output of sessionInfo() on the system on which this document was compiled:

## R version 4.6.0 (2026-04-24)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## time zone: Etc/UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ggiraph_0.9.6    ggstar_1.0.6.990 ggplot2_4.0.3    prettydoc_0.4.1 
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] gtable_0.3.6            jsonlite_2.0.0          dplyr_1.2.1            
##  [4] compiler_4.6.0          tidyselect_1.2.1        Rcpp_1.1.1-1.1         
##  [7] gridExtra_2.3           fontquiver_0.2.1        jquerylib_0.1.4        
## [10] systemfonts_1.3.2       scales_1.4.0            yaml_2.3.12            
## [13] fastmap_1.2.0           R6_2.6.1                labeling_0.4.3         
## [16] gdtools_0.5.0           generics_0.1.4          knitr_1.51             
## [19] htmlwidgets_1.6.4       MASS_7.3-65             tibble_3.3.1           
## [22] maketools_1.3.2         bslib_0.11.0            pillar_1.11.1          
## [25] RColorBrewer_1.1-3      rlang_1.2.0             cachem_1.1.0           
## [28] xfun_0.57               sass_0.4.10             sys_3.4.3              
## [31] S7_0.2.2                viridisLite_0.4.3       cli_3.6.6              
## [34] withr_3.0.2             magrittr_2.0.5          digest_0.6.39          
## [37] grid_4.6.0              lifecycle_1.0.5         vctrs_0.7.3            
## [40] evaluate_1.0.5          glue_1.8.1              fontLiberation_0.1.0   
## [43] farver_2.1.2            buildtools_1.0.0        fontBitstreamVera_0.1.1
## [46] purrr_1.2.2             rmarkdown_2.31          tools_4.6.0            
## [49] pkgconfig_2.0.3         htmltools_0.5.9