Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

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I used to be like that. Then I switched to a 40" 4k TV as a monitor a year (or two?) ago. You quickly find that it works best less as a small display into some large space (as you might view a virtual desktop view) and more like a chunk of the wall in front of you has become much more dynamic.

It's much harder to see it all at once, so you end up just treating it as a free floating space to organize things, much like a real desktop (do you layer all your items our to maximize used space on physical desks as well?).

While not working, I'll spend most the time with a browser window utilizing slightly more than a quarter of the screen towards the bottom left, and not much else, maybe some small transient file folder windows.

While working, I keep the browser, but I add a few large terminal windows. Usually one mostly upper center, bottom right, but the upper center one might overlap other windows slightly (because why not? I can make it large without slight overlap and very little loss of passive usefulness of other windows).

It's fairly liberating. I now view tight control and maximizing utilized space as a response to lack of space, which is no longer my problem. In the beginning, I wasn't sure if I was going to regret this, and was looking for utilities to set screen areas that I could maximize to, or save presets for certain applications. Then I just let go, and it's been wonderful ever since.

If you're interested, I still recommend the TV I got (or something better maybe now). It's got low input lag (~13ms) and does 60hz at 4k, all for about $500 at Amazon[1] (I think it was ~$400 when I got it on sale).

1: https://www.amazon.com/VIZIO-D40-D1-Class-Array-Smart/dp/B01...

> It's much harder to see it all at once, so you end up just treating it as a free floating space to organize things, much like a real desktop (do you layer all your items our to maximize used space on physical desks as well?).

If it wouldn't take ages to properly align paper with a 1mm border but they would magically align themselves - yes of course I would :)

Not that I work a lot with paper anymore, but I see no advantage of not aligning stuff in the real world just like a tiling wm would...

> Not that I work a lot with paper anymore, but I see no advantage of not aligning stuff in the real world just like a tiling wm would...

That depends on how you like to switch windows. Virtual windows can do one thing that papers can't, they can magically move themselves in the Z space. If you size/space your windows so that no matter what Z order things are in, there is always part of every window visible, you can VERY quickly click on that part to bring that window to the front.

Yes, I know tiling WMs can give you awesome keybindings... but some people like using the mouse or work for shitty companies that don't allow WM installs.

The analogy breaks down a bit, because it's not easy to stretch papers to different sizes as needed. I used to do this much less often, either because it was maximized or it cut into the space I had allocated for something else. Now I'll just resize a terminal much larger temporarily if I'm looking at lohs where it's beneficial (but wouldn't be all that useful for coding sessions), or pop out a new browser winder to make it larger (a video of some sort, etc).

Since space is less constrained, the size of thugs ends up being much more fluid. Once you end up using many different sizes of things (do I still need ed to see that terminal while watching some video waiting for it to finish? Maybe the size is slightly different to account for that) spending time to accurately place everything very quickly hits diminishing returns past one or two core apps.

It would be a bit like having a large desk and then buying gigantic sheets of paper to write on because otherwise you would have wasted desk space.

Do the edges of the content fall under the bezel (i.e., get cut off by the frame)? I used to have that problem with 1080p TVs, so I switched back to monitors for everything other than entertainment.

No, it has a monitor mode where you get a full 3840 by 2160.

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