Ask HN: What's the best way to use a 30" monitor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best way to use a 30" monitor?

6 pointsweaksauce14 comments

I just got a 30" Ultrasharp that I hook up to my 15" MBP. I find that using most windows fullscreen is a tough endeavor. Anyone have any tips for effective windows management?

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You might want to take a look at Divvy: http://mizage.com/divvy/

It's similar to SizeUp and Cinch, but allows for quite a few more options. You can assign one window 33% of the screen and another 66% of the screen, and tons more. And you can make presets.

Seems like the perfect option for 30" monitors. You lucky dog...

Two things this enables for me:

1. Laptop screen becomes secondary screen for programs in the background like email or Spotify or Winamp. Things I want keep open with relatively quick access but not in my face.

2. Multiple visible windows on the same screen, and on both screens. This is useful in way too many situations and a serious productivity boost.

Interesting. I use SizeUp right now to do split screen from keyboard shortcuts but I'm wondering if there was anything better with more fine grained control.

SizeUp is extremely awesome. Absolutely required.

http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

Cinch, by the same author, is also good. You don't need both.

http://irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

Yeah I do love sizeup. I even purchased cinch too for the times where I only have my hand on the mouse. But I still feel that I could use something more....

Cinch is great! Bought it before the annoy-ware popup even came up!

Really depends on what you are doing. Most of my work is coding. The big screen is directly in front of me, about 3ft away. The MBP is up against it at a slight angle on the left. I use a separate wireless keyboard and mouse. Generally I have a browser open on the MBP's screen for viewing documentation or my work in progress. On the big screen I have three or four terminal windows open, tiled side-by-side, for editing, commands line, etc. I have a boomerang shaped desk which is deep enough to put the big screen that far away. Any closer and I'm panning my head too much and that gets bothersome after a while.

I still and use a 24" Dell that I had before I sold delicious.

But if I were to get a 30", I would also get a 22" display - rotated vertically, they are the same size.

I tend to tile windows so I'll have two browser windows, two Finder windows, mail, some terminals, etc. all visible. I rarely overlap windows.

Do you have any software that helps automate this or just manually move windows around?

In Linux, there's tons of tiling window managers that automate this process. It looks like there are some projects on Windows that emulate this: http://superuser.com/questions/10347/what-tiling-window-mana...

I wish there was software to do this. There's an app that does tiling for two or four windows, but that's not enough for a 30" IMO.

Funny, I had a 30" Cinema Display that I passed on to one of my colleagues. It was just too large, in the sense that I had to physically pan my head a lot just to see things on the screen (couldn't just move my eyes). I find a 24" display more comfortable.

Porn. Lots of it.

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