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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

Love dual monitor, display on the right code on left and i3-wm, but would like to get used to just using a single monitor/laptop.

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I use both. When I am in the office I have almost the same setup you describe. Code on the right on a vertical monitor and the program itself on the left. However when I am on my laptop at home it's not that bad, it's just a bit more work to tab back and forth between the terminal, editor, and program a bit more.

This argument about which is better is really silly imo. It's not like tabbing or switching focus is the main waste of time. I'd be willing to bet a lot of people arguing for either side spend more time browsing HN or Reddit than managing their workflow :V (speculation obvs)

Interesting the right/left preference. Not sure if that's related to right/left handed or side preference I don't know. Like you read a book from left to right (sorry probably an arbitrary thought).

I too thought about the vertical oriented monitor is it good? You see more lines. I like the minmap for VSCode if you happen to use that. To see a code pattern/structure at a glance.

I had dual monitors at the office and at home. For me it really depended on where my chair was. I have a slight bias toward the left monitor at home, so my primary activity goes there. At work, my chair was slightly biased towards the right monitor so I put primary activities there.

(I also experimented with vertical monitor at work, but with the provided monitors the viewing angle was too awful. I bet it would be awesome with the right screens though.)

Haha damn chairs

I have this L-shaped desk and I feel cramped on the right side.

Ahh man did a data entry job, god I wanted to eat a bullet. Found a good keyboard though. A wired Microsoft 600 or something they're cheap but flat unlike those tall keys on older keyboards.

vertical monitor is a blessing and a curse at times. For just coding, it's great because I have more lines to reference at once. However when I show the directory tree for my projects my width is small and sometimes hard to deal with. Same problem with having a mini-map sadly.

I actually am right handed and read left-to-right. My dominant screen is my left screen and it used to be my editor screen, but I switched my code to the right because nowadays more of my work is server monitoring, communication, and review of code. The wider screen space is nice for this.

Yeah I do wish min-map only expanded when you hovered over that area, too eager to post issues/requests though on their GitHub.

What do you use for server monitoring? Do you have fail overs... I recently implemented server side encryption and was running into memory exhaustion problems, upped cores/ram. Was surprised to read it's bad or less performant when your computer starts using swap.

Man $34/mo seems expensive for hosting using t2.medium under Amazon.

Ahh well,. I like seeing the nginx worker/php-fpm pool appear in HTOP

Edit. Only using PHP as that's currently the back end language I know how to work with and what the stack uses but could see benefits using Go or something.

I'm not sure how i3-wm compares to Awesome-wm, but I think they're in the same category. I think they're called tags in awesome, and I have 9 per monitor. You assign a tag to a window with hotkeys and can specify the displayed tags with hotkeys. On a single screen, my terminal is tag 3, browser is tag 1. If I need them side by side, I can show multiple tags at once. Otherwise, I switch between them with meta+1 or meta+3. Considering i3 is also tiling, it may have similar features, but I don't know. As to why this vs alt+tab; alt+tab is a cycle of what's open and needs recognition. meta+1 is my browser; meta+3 is my editor. If I have other windows open, they're not on those tags and don't matter in switching.

Haven't heard of awesome-wm.

I like that idea. Can you save it like a state you know, open some applications, I usually have to open my note taking "app" haha gedit, and then VSCode, FileZilla (I know not a CD), local Host directory and browser.

That's a project for me an excuse to learn how to use Electron.

Thanks for the tip I like that.

I only know how to shift app tabs left haha alt+shift+j but the combining is cool alt+v and then alt+w or alt+e, I was stubborn before about using it but Ubuntu's dealt UI is so bloated.

One thing I was looking into was time-tracking how long a panel was active for working on different projects (clients). But I usually max out my 8GB RAM too many chrome tabs.

I don't know too much about internals, but it has plugins like https://github.com/Elv13/tyrannical which lets you configure windows to be on certain tags automatically, but as far as I know, there's no save state. That would save me ages when I undock.

It supports launching apps when it starts as well. VSCode sounds like windows, though. I know the OSX space of tiling window managers is terrible and it's been years since I've used windows, but bugn was my goto back then.

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