[Feature Request]: collect_strip_text option for plot_layout()

[mvanaman]

Patchwork is so awesome!

I was wondering if it would be easy to add an option to collect the strip text (or facet labels, whatever you want to call them) on faceted plots combined with patchwork. For example, notice the redundant strip text (setosa, versicolor, virignica):

library(ggplot2)
library(patchwork)
p1 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Petal.Width, y = Petal.Length)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap(~ Species)
p2 <- ggplot(iris, aes(x = Petal.Width, y = Sepal.Length)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap(~ Species)
p1 / p2 +
  plot_layout(axes = "collect")

An easy workaround for simple cases like this is to just remove the strip text on the bottom plot before patchworking:

# current workaround:
p2 <- p2 +
  theme(strip.text = element_blank())
p1 / p2 +
  plot_layout(axes = "collect")

^{Created on 2026-07-04 with reprex v2.1.1}

But if you have a bunch of plots, it's easy to lose track of individual plots, and kinda tedious to go find where you need to individually remove the strip text. It'd be nice to be able to just hand this task off to plot_layout() at the end!