How to change label and ticks of a pgfplots colorbar?

Question

I have a 3d plot with colored surface and a colorbar made with pgfplots.

My probably related questions are:

How can I set the label of the colorbar? What are the equivalents of zticks (positions of its ticks), and ztick label style (changing the format of the numbers)?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

The colour bar is a full-fledged axis environment, so all the usual options are available (like title). The ticks in this case are y ticks, so you can set the axis label using ylabel and the tick label style using yticklabel style:

\documentclass[border=5mm]{standalone}

\usepackage{pgfplots}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.6}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
    domain=-180:180,
    colorbar,
    colorbar style={
        title=Color key,
        ylabel=Z-value,
        ytick={-1,-0.75,...,1},
        yticklabel style={
            text width=2.5em,
            align=right,
            /pgf/number format/.cd,
                fixed,
                fixed zerofill
        }
    }
]
\addplot3 [surf] {sin(x) * sin(y)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}