Why I Stopped Using Multiple Monitors

Full-stack and front end developers can really improve productivity drastically and reduce ALT-TAB Keystrokes and back-and-forth scrolling when developing and testing web-pages, responsive sites as well as web applications that they use an IDE for.

At work, I have 2 monitors (21-inch each). On 1 monitor, I write my code in an IDE, usually Visual Studio or sometimes in Notepad++. On the other Monitor I have the website that I am building, open. As and when I make changes, do a build, I simply have to refresh the screen on the other monitor instead of pressing ALT-TAB over and over again and selecting the other window, if I had just 1 monitor.

The 2nd use case, also common for full-stack or web developers, is when debugging front end stuff like Javascript, CSS, HTML. I have the webpage open in 1 monitor, and the chrome debugger in the other one, so I have a full screen on each side to do the debugging. This exercise becomes especially tedious with a single monitor, wherein, when you go F12, the chrome debugger will occupy a good portion of your screen, no matter how you've docked it (to the left, or right or the bottom).

On a single monitor, this means endless clicking, scrolling back and forth on the page you are trying to debug, next think you know, your fingers and wrists are sore and you haven't gotten too far in your work and your coworkers tell you that you have RSI.

I wonder if OP is a command-line / backend developer, in which case, you may be able to get away with a single monitor and not feel the pain :)

> So why do so many workers demand multiple monitors? I believe it’s a case of the illogical allure of extremes.

> Too much of anything becomes its opposite . — Tim Ferriss

If you don't like multiple monitors, fair enough, but don't dismiss everyone else as wrong without considering how their workflow may differ from yours.

I can work fine with one screen, but I can work even better with multiple. Just like the author of this article, I make heavy use of macOS's workspaces. Being able to have three workspaces visible at once is highly preferable to just one -- it is easier to turn my head than to jump through workspaces with my keyboard shortcuts.

Unlike the author suggests, I am not trying to focus on multiple things at once -- my focus remains on one monitor at a time. The multiple monitors just makes it easier to shift focus when I need to.

The author writes that he "spent way too much time fiddling with the windows". If you have a window manager that does the "fiddling" for you, suddenly multiple screens and/or huge screens become super useful as the windows will arrange themselves in a sane way no matter what you are doing. A prime example for me is Xmonad. Yes, it takes a day to configure it and learn it but after that you will find yourself super annoyed as to why new application window that just opened did not automatically resize itself to the side, etc.

This is despite the fact that I use keyboard shortcuts for switching between maximized windows on a single monitor and do so pretty fluidly.

This is certainly not a common opinion. Most people want to glance back and forth quickly. And most people hate modal dialogs.

W10 will utterly destroy your window layout for having the audacity to undock a laptop from a two-display setup. Sometimes it will completely forget the 2nd display that had been working for weeks, with no clear way to fix. Sometimes the display is not "on" yet it is "functional" from W10, leading to aggravating scenarios like windows only located/usable from the display you can't see, requiring you to practically disconnect a laptop to use anything again.

Conceptually not hard but apparently rocket science for OS implementers.

Managed to use a 27" Thunderbolt display at each of my last 2 jobs, and I love it. I never would have used a laptop screen as a second display, because the size and pixel density is different. I don't 100% agree with the author though, as I frequently have 2 items side-by-side, and unless you're fullscreened, they resize/rearrange improperly when you switch from desktop display to laptop display.

I also kind of disagree with his use of virtual desktops -- don't get me wrong, I use them too, but I ONLY use them because I have multiple windows on a single display arranged the way I want them. If I was just using single fullscreened apps, you could just as easily alt-tab between them. Virtual desktops are for when you want a collection of windows to stay together.

I also find my biggest distraction is switching to another virtual desktop while I wait for a 10-120 second task to complete, and I get distracted. So instead I use desk toys and am willing to allow myself to "look" unproductive, waiting for a computing task to finish while I fiddle with a piece of bike chain or whatever, rather than getting lost in another task and losing focus.

Today I am using a single 27" display with my laptop display right under it. I know, violating my own rule, but it's working well for my use case of web learning+chat on the main display and a terminal window on the lower laptop display for running examples. When I'm back to "real" work I'll likely go back to a single display for focus.

Where I differ slightly is that when I am in the office, I have a single, 24" 16:9 monitor connected in addition to my laptop's screen. I use it very sparingly. It contains only iTerm, which is running tmux and has all of my dev stuff running. I almost never need to see both my terminal and my IDE/browser/whatever at once, but when I do need my terminal it's very nice to have twice the history I would normally have on my laptop's monitor on the screen at one time. I find it invaluable particularly when reading logs.

I love my multiple monitors. It lets me organize my windows without having to alt-tab between them. I find it helps me a great deal.

I don't think there's anything wrong with OP using a single monitor, but don't shit on my choices just because you think differently.

This is one of the biggest problems with people today, they believe their OPINION is the BEST, but they forget that it's just an opinion. Other people can have different opinions for perfectly valid reasons, and they're not wrong.

Many of my coworkers use multiple monitors as a way to "deal" with sprawl, except it really just facilitates sprawl. Using just one makes me be more disciplined with regards to floating and extra 4 dozen browser tabs. Multiple workspaces with their own separate reasons for existing help preserve context when switching out of a task is necessary, and again makes it easier to prune terminal and browser tabs because they exist to a particular end.

Multiple desktops and good window management are a must. Spectacle on OSX or a tiling WM on linux (not familiar with windows) are a must. Toss in tmux (obviously not mandatory) and it's great. It takes discipline, and a bit of up front work, but once you have your patterns it's much quicker to find information, tabs, terminals, etc and then toss out three chrome windows with 50 tabs and 8 terminal shells.

I do ops, and so might have to juggle a larger variety of contexts than some devs who spend 90% of their time in an IDE, but maybe not.

There is a good case to be made for two monitors if you spend extensive periods of time working with, e.g. wireshark or similar, but that's the only case I've come across in almost a decade where two monitors > one (large) monitor + good wm w/ multiple desktops.

I see the point about less distractions, but tbh I find it more distracting to swap between multiple tabs/windows/desktops than to just move my eyes.

At work (as a Software Engineer) I'd not want to have to work on one display only. I am way more productive if I don't have to switch between a billion tabs in Visual Studio.

I don't like to use needless Alt/Cmd-Tab, if I can. Not only that, on Windows, Alt-Tab is poorly implemented, and it takes me forever to search for the right window. If I have few editor windows open, it would take me a while to hunt and peck for the right one, because they all look similar. On Mac, it's a lot easier since Cmd-Tab cycles through different apps, and Cmd-backtick cycles through same apps.

Using my laptop outside wasn't that great, and I've even contemplated getting one or two small portable USB monitors, or use tablets as secondary monitor using AirDisplay or Duet.

In my case usually I use it something like this: [youtube/google music/docs][code][browser] or [folders/video files/script/client brief-indications][video editor][preview fullscreen]

I think this it's the kind of stuff that depends a lot on the way some people feel with multitasking, distractions and specially on their nature of the job.

Like the article says, probably writers, spreadsheet people, or even programmers who needs little documentation and makes all the testing in the IDE can benefit from this approach to "focus" only in one monitor.

In my open office floor plan the people who have two monitors do heavy spreadsheet work. In some fields of work deeply horizontal sheet designs (long timelines for cashflow models) are common, which makes non-maximized windows impracticable. More generally, most of the common office worker's day is developing spreadsheets and writing reports on them. Not having to alt-tab is invaluable in such situations.

(Myself, I use a laptop with an additional monitor. The laptop screen is smaller and "underprivileged", it runs web research and work chat, the larger screen holds whatever I'm intensively working on.)

It makes a big difference if you mean with 'monitor' a 27" 5k monitor or a 24" 1080p monitor. If you mean latter you definitely need two. If former one is better than two.

Right now I'm writing a thesis. It's in LaTeX, and auto compiles when a file changes. So on one monitor I've got my text editor and the PDF output. It's very nice to keep writing and get the output asynchronously, with the PDF flickering to indicate it's updated, which I can see in my peripheral vision and look over at it.

And, what if something goes wrong during compilation? I want my terminal to be visible, and again in my peripheral vision I'll see a sea of red error messages and know to look over there to see what I did wrong. So on my other monitor I have the terminal running the make command for auto-compiling.

In practice I have more windows open: version control, citations manager program, file browser. They're all part of the same task, they are not distractions. But for this workflow I need at least the text editor, the terminal, and the PDF viewer. I'm not sure how I could do this with a single monitor without seriously compromising on the amount of my actual thesis I can see on my screen in either the text editor or the PDF - maybe shrinking the terminal down tiny so I can see the last line of output and then making it larger to see the context of the error if there was one, but that's getting a bit ridiculous.

Maybe if I used a monolithic IDE for everything it would be able to fit all this information into one maximised window in a clever way, only showing me what was relevant at any one time. But if you're not using an IDE, I find that my workflow for any non-trivial task almost always involves multiple programs and windows, and switching is a pain.

And when I'm making plots for my thesis, it's text editor and terminal, and then multiple matplotlib plot windows popping up when I run the command from the terminal. If I don't want to spend all my time moving the plot windows around so that I can see the code that made them whilst I decide my next move, then multiple monitors are a godsend.

It's not like I'm leaving my email or facebook up permanently - that would be a terrible idea. My browser is minimised (unless I'm typing code based on online docs) and spotify is over on another desktop.

The other alternative is to have tiny windows of text scattered around my screen. Some people seem to enjoy working like that, but it drives me crazy.

I've never liked two monitors because one always turns into a weird status display.

Personally, I work with netflix/youtube on for background noise so I can't attest to the attention stuff, but if you're feeling a little neck/shoulder pain, try single-monitor and see if it helps.

Code under test, including a web browser and terminals are on my left monitor. My main web browser, debugger and editor / IDEs are on the right. It's really rare to have them mixed.

I originally bought 2 screens for productivity reasons, now I find I am much more productive working on my laptop else were. There were certainly moments where it helped productivity, but maybe that is offset by the distraction.

His manifesto is perhaps built upon some faulty premises...

I do some (purely amateur) and find that having the code in front, the ability to glance on a livereload browser on the left and on DevTools on the right is quite comfortable.

But as I said, I am a pure amateur and (seriously) sit in the corner "not good enough to understand why this is not effective"

However, I do still find it useful to have a laptop on my desk for my non-work email, browsing, etc. Not only does this make it easier to "find" my personal content without sifting through work-related windows, but the physical separation also helps keep it in a separate mental space from my work, which benefits both.

If you are chunking your tasks such that each monitor really is a window into a different process or different machine, then it really makes sense to have two.

If you ask yourself the question, what is my second monitor for specifically, and you can't answer it, you might prefer only having one.

I remember working on an application that ran in a clinical environment where available screens were limited (so the user base was almost 100% single screen). The developers used two screens exclusively. There was an issue that was reported by the customers which the developers could not reproduce, which would cause a complete freeze of the system. Finally, I went through the process step by step with one of the developers. I noticed that the developer would click on a pop-up message that was appearing on the right screen. The customers did not have a right screen to click on. So the process required clicking on a pop-up appearing off-screen. The problem was simple to fix, but was never noticed because the environment was different. I stuck with a single screen for years because it was what my users were using.

I use the same windows every day. I should be able to quickly hit something like "ctrl+cmd+9" and send all my windows to pre-defined places on my screen. It should allow grouping of windows by type (so all Chrome windows go to the same area) or by tagging a window.

http://www.samsung.com/us/computing/monitors/gaming/49--chg9...

I used to run three 30" 2560x1600 monitors, but that was just insane.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13968519