How about two vertical monitors? I use a laptop and normally also have connected two 27″ monitors, both vertically oriented, above it. There are certain code tasks that really benefit from the increased height of vertical orientation; as an example, last week I was doing some substantial rebasing, and the increased vertical height in a four-way diff was invaluable. Most of the time I find I’m actually using at most one of the external displays, but it’s definitely still common to get practical value out of both of them. Referring to web pages or other documents on vertical screens is also normally better—mostly normally because they’re half the DPI of my laptop display.
(The slight off-centring of the laptop in this diagram is also curiously realistic; early on, a couple of years ago, I had it centred; but a few weeks ago I looked closely at where it had ended up, and found that I consistently placed the laptop definitely right of centre, and favour the right-hand monitor to the left.)
A few others in the company use one or more vertical screens too. Those of us who do, certainly like the increased vertical space.
Quality of window management is also going to be an important factor: of the two main OSes: Windows is good at simple window-per-screen and two-tiled-windows-per-screen arrangements; macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it. (I’m on Windows for now, but I’m planning on trying Arch Linux, which I previously used, on my Surface Book, as it’s now probably good enough to work with. With Sway (i3 clone for Wayland), its handling of such a screen arrangement will be superb.)
So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe).
It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.
This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses. Just moving the eyeballs up is not enough, you have to move the head a lot. I use three horizontal 24' monitors and find it almost ideal. I could use one more stacked vertically where I place some windows which I glance at less often than a minute or so, like a grid of tmux panes containing logs.
Perhaps the problem you've experienced is with the 16:9 monitors that were forced on everyone a ~half decade back. Or rather 9:16 in this orientation. I still (barely) prefer them vertical, but it is true they are not optimal either.
I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.
I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.
I'd like a citation here. Keeping your headed tilted at an odd angle for months is ergonomically unsafe. Head motions? I've never seen studies that motion was unsafe, so long as the neutral position was neutral. Indeed, all I've seen suggests you want to move and stretch more.
The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.
I have a setup similar to GP’s except with a horizontal monitor between the two vertical monitors. The part of my desk holding the monitors is physically separate from the part my keyboard rests on so I can sit as close or as far away as I like. I tend to sit father back than I do with my gaming rig which is a single curved ultra wide. Probably better on my eyes. Most of my work is on the horizontal screen. Vertical screens are typically used for referencing information or if I use them heavily for other purposes I tend to have windows at the same level of as the horizontal screen.
So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe)
Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)
The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.
Two portrait, one landscape (actually all the same size, which i couldn't be bothered to do in the diagram, sorry); one window maximised on the landscape, and each portrait tiled with two windows.
It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.
To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.
But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.
Some of us will change our entire lifestyle just to find reasons to donate screen space to live data streams for no reason other than that it looks cool and satisfies our deep-seated nerd fantasies.
What is the point of a 4-way diff? I never used a rebase workflow and I always merge. When merging you compare the common ancestor with the two different branches, and it’s the perfect use case for a three monitors setup with the three-way diff. From what I understand rebasing is pretty much the same but it rewrites history to have a single branch. Why you would need a 4-way diff in a rebase instead of a 3-way diff?
If you want to see what changed between two versions you are merging (both without your changes), your currently in progress merge, and your current version before you started merging.
I have 3x 39" 4K TV's as my monitors. As Shown in the above, I use them as the equivlant of 6x ultra-talls.
I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.
Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.
Please pardon my comment with limited background knowledge but are you sure that TVs, with their hardware designed to make you look from far are a good idea to keep close to your eyes?
I have 1x 43" 4K monitor (Dell P4317Q), and together with a tiling WM it's pretty awesome as you say. It's more expensive (I think $800), not sure if it's sufficiently better as to be worth it.
How far away are they? That's a lot of physical space to cover.
I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.
But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.
macOS has terrible native window management, but there are a number of window manager programs that are as good as what's available on Linux. BetterTouchTool is my favorite.
Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB).
Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.
In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.
I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.
I've become quite fond of Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst). Especially it's 3Column Middle Wide layout in combination with swapping windows using the mouse and mouse pointer being placed in the middle of a switched-to window have been godsents for my daily workflows.
Triple for me. Have an Ergotech stand with the extra wide arm. In the middle sits a 21:9 34" 3440x1440, then on each side floating in the air a 16:10 24" 1920x1200.
Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.
TL;DR : if you want to mount monitors vertically side-by-side, try before you buy.
One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.
That sounds weird, so let me explain:
LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).
Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.
But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.
It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.
> macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.
I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.
I tried this before and my neck was sore for a week. It was really really painful. I’ve basicslly given up on dual monitors in general, give me one 27” 5K (iMac) monitor and I’m happy.
I found that the most problems are for the eyes, if the monitors take too much of your FOV. I worked in the past with 8 monitors and after a while it really impairs my ability to focus far away. Luckily it seems reversible after several months, especially if you spend a lot of time outside looking far away.
I recently switched to a landscape 28" 3K monitor as my main monitor, with a portrait 24" monitor as secondary - I've found this arrangement suits me really well. I typically have a console window open in the lower half of the portrait monitor, then something else in the top half depending on what I'm doing (maybe unit tests window, or a DB admin tool, whatever)
Yeah, and that's even the hero image of this article with no mention. I find having a secondary monitor in portrait is great. Laptop is primary, but the portrait is great for reading. Also, for debugging for mobile.
That will depend a little on the window management techniques employed. For me, it works very well, and I would actually consider a seamless blend of the two displays to be a slight regression, given Windows’ automatic snap behaviour or i3-like layout.
But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)
I used to have 2 monitors side by side turned vertically. The problem for me was that the rotation was down in software in the video driver and many redraws were noticeably slower. It was long ago though (2007 ish), maybe modern performance makes it unnoticeable.
The other issue I've noticed is the (polarizing?) filter built into monitors seems to be oriented for landscape viewing only. So when you have screens in portrait, there's no perfect viewing angle that lets you see all the way left to right on the screen surface, without the filter obscuring one of the sides.
If you’re on windows, display fusion is a top notch window manager, it gives a single button to span wide across all screens for time when you want on window to rule them all.
I am a minority opinion here. I don’t like turning my head and I like just having everything I need for a 2 hour sprint visible at once on the screen.
At home I use a MacBook with a 22” retina I bought at the Apple store, the external monitor place directly above the laptop. I rarely do video or photo editing, but I spend a lot of time writing books and also programming. This is plenty of space for me. This is not a matter of money: 6 months after I bought this monitor for my home use, I started working at a large financial services company; I could choose any monitor(s) I wanted and I chose exactly what I have at home.
I don’t multi-task, especially in my home office. I like having just what I need for my current task visible.
I bought a System76 Oryx Pro last fall with a 16” 4K display and I find the screen size so adequate to my development needs (I use that laptop just for machine learning, it has a 1070 GPU) that I don’t even bother hooking it up to an external monitor.
I have spent so many years working on remote servers in a few SSH shell windows. This might affect the setup I chose for all-local development and writing.
There is little benefit in multiple monitors for Office work (Excel, word, etc).
Server admins have some benefits for multimonitors.. i.e keeping documentation open while you're on the server etc.
Especially if the Excel rows arent too wide
GUI development gets massive value from multiple monitors. Nothing beats having the application open and visible while you're changing the code.
It gets even more important if you're a full stack developer, which has several terminals open to keep track of logs, a browser for the webpage you're modifying and the editor for changes.
You definitely raise some valid use cases where you need more real estate, but I think a big reason people on Mac/Windows feel like they need more space is because window management is so poor on those platforms. I came from Linux where I used tiling window managers and I really missed that on Mac. I ended up installing Amethyst and while it's not nearly as powerful as the window managers I was using before, it almost entirely killed my desire for my real estate. Now I can quickly and evenly split my editor, terminal, and browser into various layouts and adjust them as needed.
Office/office work can absolutely benefit from multiple monitors or large monitors. For instance, having spreadsheets open for reference, at the same time as a document you're writing.
I'm most productive on a single (big) 4k screen. I normally run at 125% scaling and it's perfect for my work (desktop application developer). My main Windows desktop is where I work (usually Visual Studio or PyCharm plus a browser) then I have a second virtual desktop where I have stuff that I need throughout the day, but use infrequently (music player, email, slack, skype). I have keyboard shortcuts to jump to any of my frequently used applications.
I'm easily distracted so I want to keep as few windows in view as possible.
I keep a book and a guitar near my desk and rather than jump to Reddit or HN when I'm rebuilding, I'll read a few pages, play some scales, or go make some tea.
+1 for keeping a book and guitar handy! I keep my guitar packed away but do keep an American Indian flute and a didgeridoo handy. I think music, played briefly while waiting for a machine learning experiment, large Haskell project build, etc. is much better than web browsing because it does not ruin focus.
+1 for playing some music as a form of break.
When I was younger I often practiced simple songs on a tin-whistle, recorder, kaval or flute. I liked the saxophone the most but that requires too much maintenance, hence it's a distraction.
Agreed. Another reason I prefer this setup is because I don't like using an external mouse or trackpad with my Macbook Pro. I use the swipe options extensively to switch workspaces and I like having my hands close to my typing position at all times.
> I use the swipe options extensively to switch workspaces
The mouse that I have lets me remap the buttons, so I have two of them mapped to "switch left" (like a three-finger swipe) and "switch right." I find that that is pretty nice for me.
Same here, that's why I have one of my desktop monitors (~22") above the other. At work, I used a similar setup with my ThinkPad in a docking station as the lower screen, but then again you get the small screen penalty ;-)
Notably missing from this study is any note of the display resolution. The market is flooded with a glut of 22-26" monitors that have the same low resolution as the smaller ones they are supposedly designed to replace.
This is all also really dependent on the applications you run. I'm personally stuck running a CRM and remote control programs that open new windows for everything. 1 large high-resolution display + heavy use of macOS workspace seems like the best way to deal with it, though my colleagues all prefer 2 displays. Anecdotal observation indicates that none of us can easily find the window we were just looking at once we move away from it, so I think the window manager needs work too.
>> The market is flooded with a glut of 22-26" monitors that have the same low resolution as the smaller ones
The 27/30" inch monitors that are only 1080 make no sense to me. Maybe if you have really bad vision. I love my LG 4K and would like a 27" 5K but they're expensive. The text is so sharp on those things.
But, for a 21" monitor that is only 1080, if you're using multiple ones, you can sit back far enough away to be able to see 4 of them and not have the text unreadably small.
The younger guys at work like 25" 2560x1440 monitors and just run 8 point fonts, my vision was never very good so I could never use that for more than a few minutes. I'm using a pair of 27" monitors but I do end up turning my head a lot. I'd like to try a 3840x1440 screen.
We have a couple Steelcase 'collaboration tables', some with 1 40-something inch TV and some with 2 slightly smaller ones. They basically look like this:
They are very nice to use for a few hours. My theory is that with the screen being 3-4 feet away from your eyes, your eyes are very relaxed. Watching TV vs reading a book.
This is despite the fact that they are only 1080 resolution. I'm sure we could stick 4K screens in there but I'm not sure how much more useful the resolution would be at 40".
I don't even understand the 27" 2560x1440 things that seem to be most trendy in the recent years. I tried one for a couple of days and couldn't make it work. Without scaling things are too tiny, but for a reasonable scaling that doesn't take too much quality away the resolution is simply too low. 27" 4k is a lot better, and looks ok at about 175% scaling. However I'm really looking forward to 5k and above getting more mainstream, so that we finally get good quality (like the Macbook screens) for desktops.
Ideal window manager for me would be a 2-tier affair were at the top-most tier I would create task specific groups. Each group itself would work something like the linear sequence of the OS X spaces.
To summarize the 43 comments so far: different people have different preferences, so a one-size-fits-all policy will make lots of people unhappy. Offer people a choice and if possible, allow them to try out several configurations to see what works best for them.
Here's another config I never see mentioned, but I love it. One giant 42" 4K TV. They are relatively inexpensive now (~$200) and it's roughly the same as having 4x 21" monitors conjoined in a square. It's very important to tone down the brightness and back-light considerably, since TVs are designed for sitting about 10 feet away, but they work great as monitors if you buy a good brand. Make sure your graphics card can support ultra high resolutions, and use a modern HDMI cable capable of 4K.
edit: Ensure 60Hz or higher refresh rate. This should be true if the TV is a good brand.
I've been using 6 x 1920x1200 displays for several years - 5 x 24" plus the laptop's own 15" panel [1] in a corner configuration with 3 in portrait orientation (perfect for reading documents and web pages).
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I'm so used to being able to distribute 'tasks' and workflow to specific monitors that I struggle terribly, to the point of giving up in frustration, when having to use a single display for anything other than casual or single application use.
I use a combination of head movement and rotating the chair depending on task.
The outstanding benefit is to have multiple applications and documents open and readable simultaneously, just as I would with multiple physical reference books.
An added benefit is having the same 'book' (document) open at different 'pages' on different monitors - and not need to flick back and forward between 'pages' or tabs.
This is using GNU/Linux Xorg server with 4 X sessions.
[1] Dell XPS with ExpressCard -> PCIe ViDock extender containing an Nvidia NVS420 driving 4 monitors, the laptop panel, and an HDMI connection, all 1920x1200.
Mostly bug-hunting and coding in unfamiliar code bases so I need a lot of resources instantly available in front of me to compare and figure out relationships.
However, it does make remote sys-admin safer too in that I can assign remote hosts to specific monitors - avoids the risk of accidentally issuing commands to the wrong target!
This makes a lot of sense. Going from two monitors to ultrawide, I miss the easy context switch of swapping between monitors. Being able to compartmentalize different tasks to different monitors is practically ingrained in my DNA at this point.
With 6 monitors I think I'd struggle to remember what was on each screen and have my head and eyes constantly scanning around! Kind of reminds me of those people that run Windows with no less than 42 shortcuts on their desktop!
2 separate monitors is almost always going to win vs 1 ultra wide monitor.
1. You can orient them independently.
2. You can position them in ways that are more suitable to your environment. For example if you wanted a small gap in the middle to fit an eye level web cam, you can do that.
3. If you put them flush together, 2x 24" inch monitors has roughly the same head movement requirements as a single 48" monitor.
4. 2 monitors gives you the option to do a GPU pass through VM which is extremely useful in some cases (running native Linux but wanting native Windows performance for certain apps without dual booting).
5. It's usually easier to manage multiple applications using native window snapping tools. It's also easier to ignore a 2nd monitor vs the 2nd half of a single monitor.
They are measured diagonally so the width of 2x24 is not the same as 1x48. Also the bevels do take up a noticeable amount of space, but will likely get better.
I definitely agree about the window management though. I went from 2x27 to 1x34 and found it much easier to organize windows on the two displays.
Good call on the diagonal measurements but it's not a big difference in the end. Both of my monitors have about a 1/4" inch bezel. So there's 1/2" of extra space and this monitor isn't made to have slim bezels. If you need to move your neck to see an extra 2 inches, that's not really going to make a noticeable difference in the end. You can also choose to sit back a fraction of an inch further to fit more in your field of view.
I find #5 a disadvantage as with 1 widescreen monitor I can easily snap an app perfectly in the center of my vision and ignore the edges. But with two monitors, if I’m ignoring a monitor that means my neck is angled the entire time or I’m physically adjusting or moving monitors.
This is an area that could use some work. I use MaxTo on Windows to set up snapping regions on my 34" ultrawide. It's pretty good but I sure think it would be better if it was built into Windows.
It’s a similar story on mac. There are multiple third party utilities to help snap windows to predefined areas, but it seems like they are fighting the OS.
> So, why do we spend money to display several things at once?
Because there's a higher cost to switching windows than just switching where you're looking.
This isn't just a developer / office worker debate, the aviation industry has done it too. Having dedicated displays is almost always better than having to cycle through windows until you find the one you want.
I guess it depends on your usage. Under my tiling setup I usually already know which "workspace" is the one I want, and how to summon it directly with a key combination. No cycling.
I find it quicker and easier to change workspace than to turn my head. For me there is one optimal display position, so I always want to be using it.
I also might have 10 workspaces, but I don't have 10 displays.
In the past I have used a three display setup where the workspace I summon gets pulled to the centre display, swapping with other workspaces, which may be displayed on the peripheral displays. However, I found that I never really liked looking at the peripheral displays while I worked, so I switched to using a single display.
I gave up on multiple monitors because I can't carry them around with me and many times I like to work away from the desk.
As a result I'd find when I'm on the laptop, my work flow would deteriorate because I'm used to multiple windows rather than the alt tab sequence.
So I made the decision to only use a 15" screen for everything, heavily depending on alt tab.
As a result I've developed a muscle memory where there is zero thought alt tabbing to any window.
This keeps my eyes in the same place - which decreases the tracking/fatigue involved and less context switch.
However, using a second monitor does increase productivity when using a monitor behind the laptop for multiple log tails - mostly because 15" is not enough to show that data.
They only had 3 participants. You can’t make any claims or generalizations from these results since they will likely be caused by individual differences of the participants. There may also be ordering effects.
Not to mention that we don't know if people naturally adjust to their environment over time so those "efficiency" gains disappear as users adapt to the environment (eg virtual desktops). Also no indication of operating system or task involved.
Readit News
A few others in the company use one or more vertical screens too. Those of us who do, certainly like the increased vertical space.
Quality of window management is also going to be an important factor: of the two main OSes: Windows is good at simple window-per-screen and two-tiled-windows-per-screen arrangements; macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it. (I’m on Windows for now, but I’m planning on trying Arch Linux, which I previously used, on my Surface Book, as it’s now probably good enough to work with. With Sway (i3 clone for Wayland), its handling of such a screen arrangement will be superb.)
It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.
I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.
I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.
The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.
Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)
The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.
It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.
To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.
But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.
Maybe i should try this:
Use the left for docs/spreadsheets/plots, middle for the IDE, top right for monitoring/CI/market data, bottom right for terminals.I may have docs or a search window on one monitor and the IDE in another but I'll completely log out of anything social (including email).
I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.
Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.
1) Input lag. A mouse 200+ms behind is frustrating to work with.
2) Color space. I forget the terms off hand, but basically if the panel has poor colour space / bit depth / whatever, fonts start looking really bad.
Maybe you lucked out or just don't notice/care about these, but that's one of the core reasons people don't use TVs.
I'm quite tempted to get a large good one though.
Also, where do you get 39" 4K for $300!?
I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.
But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.
Dead Comment
Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB). Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.
In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.
I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.
To be fair IntelliJ didn't work with xmonad out of the box either. I had to set some strange `startupHook = setWMName "LG3D"` Source: https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#P...
Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.
* Center - main focus of work (normally an IDE) * Left - Documentation * Right - Browser/Simulator * Mac - Slack/Chat/Email/Calender
One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.
That sounds weird, so let me explain:
LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).
Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.
But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.
It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.
I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.
1. https://www.madrau.com/ 2. https://www.spectacleapp.com/
It's helps with coding, too, but scrolling is still usually necessary there.
macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.
MacOS is good for doing it horizontally, but you're right — there should be a mechanism for vertical tiling on portrait displays in macOS.
But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)
It’s last update is a bit buggy, but it’s great
At home I use a MacBook with a 22” retina I bought at the Apple store, the external monitor place directly above the laptop. I rarely do video or photo editing, but I spend a lot of time writing books and also programming. This is plenty of space for me. This is not a matter of money: 6 months after I bought this monitor for my home use, I started working at a large financial services company; I could choose any monitor(s) I wanted and I chose exactly what I have at home.
I don’t multi-task, especially in my home office. I like having just what I need for my current task visible.
I bought a System76 Oryx Pro last fall with a 16” 4K display and I find the screen size so adequate to my development needs (I use that laptop just for machine learning, it has a 1070 GPU) that I don’t even bother hooking it up to an external monitor.
I have spent so many years working on remote servers in a few SSH shell windows. This might affect the setup I chose for all-local development and writing.
EDIT: corrected second sentence
There is little benefit in multiple monitors for Office work (Excel, word, etc). Server admins have some benefits for multimonitors.. i.e keeping documentation open while you're on the server etc.
Especially if the Excel rows arent too wide
GUI development gets massive value from multiple monitors. Nothing beats having the application open and visible while you're changing the code.
It gets even more important if you're a full stack developer, which has several terminals open to keep track of logs, a browser for the webpage you're modifying and the editor for changes.
I'm easily distracted so I want to keep as few windows in view as possible.
I keep a book and a guitar near my desk and rather than jump to Reddit or HN when I'm rebuilding, I'll read a few pages, play some scales, or go make some tea.
Same here, I dont like to "sit" in a position where my head is turned because it can hurt my neck.
The mouse that I have lets me remap the buttons, so I have two of them mapped to "switch left" (like a three-finger swipe) and "switch right." I find that that is pretty nice for me.
Same here, that's why I have one of my desktop monitors (~22") above the other. At work, I used a similar setup with my ThinkPad in a docking station as the lower screen, but then again you get the small screen penalty ;-)
This is all also really dependent on the applications you run. I'm personally stuck running a CRM and remote control programs that open new windows for everything. 1 large high-resolution display + heavy use of macOS workspace seems like the best way to deal with it, though my colleagues all prefer 2 displays. Anecdotal observation indicates that none of us can easily find the window we were just looking at once we move away from it, so I think the window manager needs work too.
The 27/30" inch monitors that are only 1080 make no sense to me. Maybe if you have really bad vision. I love my LG 4K and would like a 27" 5K but they're expensive. The text is so sharp on those things.
But, for a 21" monitor that is only 1080, if you're using multiple ones, you can sit back far enough away to be able to see 4 of them and not have the text unreadably small.
The younger guys at work like 25" 2560x1440 monitors and just run 8 point fonts, my vision was never very good so I could never use that for more than a few minutes. I'm using a pair of 27" monitors but I do end up turning my head a lot. I'd like to try a 3840x1440 screen.
We have a couple Steelcase 'collaboration tables', some with 1 40-something inch TV and some with 2 slightly smaller ones. They basically look like this:
https://images.steelcase.com/image/upload/v1415376898/www.st...
They are very nice to use for a few hours. My theory is that with the screen being 3-4 feet away from your eyes, your eyes are very relaxed. Watching TV vs reading a book.
This is despite the fact that they are only 1080 resolution. I'm sure we could stick 4K screens in there but I'm not sure how much more useful the resolution would be at 40".
edit: Ensure 60Hz or higher refresh rate. This should be true if the TV is a good brand.
I use a combination of head movement and rotating the chair depending on task.
The outstanding benefit is to have multiple applications and documents open and readable simultaneously, just as I would with multiple physical reference books.
An added benefit is having the same 'book' (document) open at different 'pages' on different monitors - and not need to flick back and forward between 'pages' or tabs.
This is using GNU/Linux Xorg server with 4 X sessions.
[1] Dell XPS with ExpressCard -> PCIe ViDock extender containing an Nvidia NVS420 driving 4 monitors, the laptop panel, and an HDMI connection, all 1920x1200.
[1] http://iam.tj/projects/misc/workstation-6-monitor.jpg [2] http://iam.tj/projects/misc/xorg.XPS-NVS420-6monitor.conf
However, it does make remote sys-admin safer too in that I can assign remote hosts to specific monitors - avoids the risk of accidentally issuing commands to the wrong target!
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
1. You can orient them independently.
2. You can position them in ways that are more suitable to your environment. For example if you wanted a small gap in the middle to fit an eye level web cam, you can do that.
3. If you put them flush together, 2x 24" inch monitors has roughly the same head movement requirements as a single 48" monitor.
4. 2 monitors gives you the option to do a GPU pass through VM which is extremely useful in some cases (running native Linux but wanting native Windows performance for certain apps without dual booting).
5. It's usually easier to manage multiple applications using native window snapping tools. It's also easier to ignore a 2nd monitor vs the 2nd half of a single monitor.
I definitely agree about the window management though. I went from 2x27 to 1x34 and found it much easier to organize windows on the two displays.
This is an area that could use some work. I use MaxTo on Windows to set up snapping regions on my 34" ultrawide. It's pretty good but I sure think it would be better if it was built into Windows.
Because there's a higher cost to switching windows than just switching where you're looking.
This isn't just a developer / office worker debate, the aviation industry has done it too. Having dedicated displays is almost always better than having to cycle through windows until you find the one you want.
I find it quicker and easier to change workspace than to turn my head. For me there is one optimal display position, so I always want to be using it.
I also might have 10 workspaces, but I don't have 10 displays.
In the past I have used a three display setup where the workspace I summon gets pulled to the centre display, swapping with other workspaces, which may be displayed on the peripheral displays. However, I found that I never really liked looking at the peripheral displays while I worked, so I switched to using a single display.
I gave up on multiple monitors because I can't carry them around with me and many times I like to work away from the desk.
As a result I'd find when I'm on the laptop, my work flow would deteriorate because I'm used to multiple windows rather than the alt tab sequence.
So I made the decision to only use a 15" screen for everything, heavily depending on alt tab.
As a result I've developed a muscle memory where there is zero thought alt tabbing to any window.
This keeps my eyes in the same place - which decreases the tracking/fatigue involved and less context switch.
However, using a second monitor does increase productivity when using a monitor behind the laptop for multiple log tails - mostly because 15" is not enough to show that data.
Studies in general assume a certain level of scientific rigour, reproducibility and verifiability.
To further your point, the discussion here is as valuable as the original article: people sharing their individual anecdotal experiences.