I'm aware of subclassing pg.AxisItem and using strings for axis ticks but I haven't found a straightforward way to not show the graph parts without data. I have tried to workaround this by directly accessing the index from the plot data (pandas dataframe in my case) and by using an integer continuous index in my dataframe. Then using tickStrings I can get the string representation of the index from the corresponding column. My problem using this approach is that the dataframe index and subsequently the axis values cannot be a continuous integer but needs to be a unix epoch time. This is the part where I'm stuck.