How to change pandas dataframe plot from vertical to horizontal and add line spacing for the axis labels?

Question

I plotted a dataframe using the following command

df['col1'].value_counts().plot.bar(orientation='vertical')

The output is shown as above. I would like to change two things:

1. swap the x and y axis so i can read the current x axis text from left to right (NOTE the current x axis labels contains long text and it is hard to read it vertically. Picture is truncated at the bottom for simplicity of this post)
2. add line spacing between the labels for the current x axis so it helps reading (will be on the y axis if step 1 is done). If increasing the size of the plot is needed, please suggest how to do so.

I have tried a few things but none of them have any visible effects. e.g.,

plt.xticks(linespacing=1.5)
np.linspace(-1, 1, 10000)

Answer 1

You can plot horizontally directly. Also, consider setting a different font size in advance, e.g.:

plt.rcParams.update({'font.size': 6})  # Arbitrary
df['col1'].value_counts().plot(kind="barh", figsize=(5, 20))