Coding Horror: Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity? | Hacker News Reader

Coding Horror: Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity?

codinghorror.com

24 pointse1ven9 comments

Instead of incessantly dragging, sizing, minimizing and maximizing windows, you can do actual productive work.

I have no idea what he's talking about here. My work day starts with me opening one firefox window (full-screen), and one emacs window (also full-screen). That's pretty much all I look at for 12 hours every day. Dragging? Resizing? Not so much. Being productive? Yes.

I've worked that way as well, but lately I've found that I'm typing C-x b RET a whole lot to find my way to the buffer I want to view or edit.

So I've ended up with multiple terminal windows:

- emacs

- mysql

- console output

- extra shell to fiddle in

I'm well aware that could all be in one big emacs window, but not having to switch buffers is a worthwhile tradeoff.

I use one big display, and I don't have a problem with this, either. Even on my 17" widescreen laptop, I never have Firefox maximized. I simply have a standard location that it opens to, my other applications fit around that in their standard places, and I go from there. Alt+F9 minimizes in Gnome, Alt+Tab switches between applications. I rarely touch the mouse in relation to window management, so this business of wasting time manipulating windows is something that I have not experienced.

You never find yourself, say, opening the same site in two browser windows that are as large as possible -- one Firefox and one IE -- and then using emacs to implement CSS fixes while simultaneously ranting about the stupidity of IE6 to your sympathetic teammates over Skype chat?

I guess it's just me.

But, even so, an enlightened emacs user can see more at once with a larger screen than with a smaller one.

Well, sometimes I wish I had a screen wide enough so that I can have 2x2 emacs-windows instead of 1x2 and then another screen for firefox.

screen + vi here, more or less the same results

I think the answer depends on what one is actually working on.

When I worked as an equity trader, having multiple monitors was a godsend; it eliminated the need to flip through at least five different systems all on the same monitor.

At home, I have a Windows laptop and Mac desktop that I will often switch between while programming, and I don't feel that using both of them at the same time makes me anymore productive. If I am programming in C++, I will be using Visual Studio on the laptop, and if I am programming anything else, I will be on the Mac in vim. I would only stop to look up something on the other, but usually if I stop to look something up it is because I am frustrated with some problem, and at that point I usually take a break from code just to clear my mind.

Previous discussion of the Utah study:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134318

I use a laptop and desktop next to each other when I'm at home, and I like to think I'm more productive than I'd be with just one monitor. If I'm compiling or converting or doing something processor intensive on one computer, it's easy to keep an api reference up on another screen for easy looking up of functions, or any other web related issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com