Comment by jeffhuys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffhuys | Hacker News Reader

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So, he doesn't like 16:9 or 16:10 because he doesn't use the extra space? I think I couldn't live without a wide-screen.. screen. Most of the time, I have 2 or 3 files side-by-side. I also think that the author actually has a different problem: a bad trackpad. He stated he needs to scroll a lot to view content, and a nice trackpad goes a long way with this.

It all comes down to opinion; I'd rather have a wide screen than a high screen, because I feel really agile with my huge trackpad.

> Please consider the needs of such user as I and many of my colleagues. Academics and various assorted IT professionals are not an insignificant group of users. And even if only a part of them are having the same frustrations as me when buying notebooks, this is still a large group, I’m sure. Please consider providing such people as us with a little choice in the matter of screen ratios. There is our money in this for you. Lots of money!

I don't think there's "lots of money" there. I also think the companies that make these laptops do the necessary market research and come to the conclusion that wide-screen sells better.

Extra space? There is no extra space, if anything the aspect ratio of wide-screens makes the screen smaller if keeping with the weird diagonal measurements.

16:9 is in my opinion quite terrible for computer work, 16:10 is ok but hardly great.

While it helps sometimes to have two windows side by side, the focus is convincingly better with a single window in the front of the eyes.

The most important use-case I have for side-by-side windows is having a file explorer as the second window, which too does not need half the width. I disable the tree pane (using tabs instead if I need multiple folders together), and do a 3:1 split for the windows. Even then, I see myself always maximizing the primary window for a better focus.

I place the Windows taskbar on the sides to create more vertical space for documents, and discovered accidentally that placing it on the right side made it less distracting for work. (Perhaps given left-to-right reading order, our initial focus is skewed towards the left.) These seemingly little things do make a significant difference to usability and productivity.

> I also think that the author actually has a different problem: a bad trackpad. He stated he needs to scroll a lot to view content, and a nice trackpad goes a long way with this.

Well - he has no trackpad, actually. The X60s he mentions has only a trackpoint. But even though this trackpoint is wonderful for scrolling, it's not the point - he wants to see the content, not scroll through it.

I get it, when I upgraded from X61s to to a new 12" laptop, I also didn't like the reduced screen height. But these old laptops had low resolution screen, and the extra resolution of FHD screen more than makes up for the smaller vertical physical size. And I can have two documents side-by-side.

You can still do that with 4:3. Think of the dimensions of a real open book.. it's quite alright :)

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