Congrats, you did it. It works by adding relayout!(fig) and calling the fig again at the end. Thanks a lot. This turnaround is extremely useful when dealing with large panel data sets.
For posterity, the code that works in VSCode, with an external plots window, is the solution provided by @jd-foster above:
fig = plot(df_tips, Layout(); x=:total_bill, y=:tip, facet_col=:sex, color=:smoker, mode="markers")
for sp in fig.plot.layout.annotations
sp.text = split(sp.text,"=")[end]
end
relayout!(fig)
fig
with no more sex= in the plot:
