R ggplot2 ggrepel - label a subset of points while being aware of all points

You can try the following:

1. Assign a blank label ("") to all the other points from the original data, so that geom_text_repel takes them into consideration when repelling labels from one another;
2. Increase the box.padding parameter from the default 0.25 to some larger value, for greater distance between labels;
3. Increase the x and y-axis limits, to give the labels more space at the four sides to repel towards.

Example code (with box.padding = 1):

ggplot(dt,        aes(x = one, y = two, color = diff_cat)) +  geom_point() +  geom_text_repel(data = . %>%                     mutate(label = ifelse(diff_cat %in% c("type_1", "type_2") & abs(diff) > 2,                                          name, "")),                  aes(label = label),                   box.padding = 1,                  show.legend = FALSE) + #this removes the 'a' from the legend  coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-5, 5), ylim = c(-5, 5)) +  theme_bw()

Here's another attempt, with box.padding = 2:

(Note: I'm using ggrepel 0.8.0. I'm not sure if all the functionalities are present for earlier package versions.)