Can a transformation be made to apply to the rest of the commands in a TikZ picture?

Question

One nice feature of TikZ is that you can apply a coordinate transformation in the middle of a \draw command (or \path, etc.) and it will automatically apply to the rest of whatever is in the command. I'd like to be able to use a command inside a tikzpicture that similarly applies a transformation automatically to all subsequent \draw commands, i.e., that lasts across semicolons.

For instance, consider the following working example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1.5]
    \foreach \n in {1,...,5}
    {
        \draw[thick,->] (-1.5,0) -- (4.5,0) node[right] {$x$};
        [yshift=-1cm];
    }
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
%
%
\rule{0pt}{2cm}
%
%
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1.5]
    \foreach \n in {0cm,1cm,...,4cm}
    {
        \draw[yshift=\n, thick, ->] (-1.5,0) -- (4.5,0) node[right] {$x$};
    }
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
\end{document}

The second picture gives the result I want; the first picture is the style of code I would like to use for it.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

One way of applying a transformation to all subsequent objects in a tikzpicture is to use \every path/.append style={<transformation command>}, which accumulates the options you pass to it. To reset it (it is initially empty), you can call \tikzset{every path/.style={}}.

However, in your case there's an additional problem: \foreach loops group the commands, so changes to the every path style are limited to each iteration of the loop. If you're still set on using your approach, you will need to ungroup the loop. The pgfplots package provides a \pgfplotsforeachungrouped command, that works like the normal \foreach in every way except for the fact that it doesn't introduce groups.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz, pgfplots}


\begin{document}
\begin{center}

\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=1.5]
{
    \pgfplotsforeachungrouped \n in {1,...,5}
    {
        \draw[thick,->] (-1.5,0) -- (4.5,0) node[right] {$x$};
        \tikzset{every path/.append style={yshift=-1cm}}
    }
}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
\end{document}