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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe).

It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.

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This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses. Just moving the eyeballs up is not enough, you have to move the head a lot. I use three horizontal 24' monitors and find it almost ideal. I could use one more stacked vertically where I place some windows which I glance at less often than a minute or so, like a grid of tmux panes containing logs.

This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses.

I have fairly aggressive progressive trifocals, and don't have problems with my 27" portrait monitors. I just angle them so the top tilts toward me.

How far do each of you sit from the monitors?

Perhaps the problem you've experienced is with the 16:9 monitors that were forced on everyone a ~half decade back. Or rather 9:16 in this orientation. I still (barely) prefer them vertical, but it is true they are not optimal either.

I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.

I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.

I have a Surface Studio as my main work monitor and two vertical 16:9 monitors I keep terminals and documents on. It's great for editing code and having windows side by side. I think we may seem a little bit of a resurgence of the 3:2 aspect ratio, but that maybe be wishful thinking.

I'd like a citation here. Keeping your headed tilted at an odd angle for months is ergonomically unsafe. Head motions? I've never seen studies that motion was unsafe, so long as the neutral position was neutral. Indeed, all I've seen suggests you want to move and stretch more.

The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.

Sorry - are you asking the parent for a citation on how it made them feel?

Parent never described how it made them feel -- they described the motions they made, and called that not ergonomically safe. If op has said "I got a kink in my neck," it'd be a different story.

That's actually a perfectly legitimate thing to ask for. Our feelings and subjective experiences are very real, but our recall of them is terrible. Properly tracked, they're useful data, and such tracking could be cited here. Summoned up from memory, they're noise.

I don't want to live in a world where feelings are only valid when backed up with a spreadsheet.

> The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk.

That’s because it is bunk. Low back pain researchers found ages ago that the most ergonomic setup for alleviating back pain was the one that let you shift positions every 15 minutes or so. There is no position so ergonomic that the body can tolerate holding it for extended periods of time.

I have a setup similar to GP’s except with a horizontal monitor between the two vertical monitors. The part of my desk holding the monitors is physically separate from the part my keyboard rests on so I can sit as close or as far away as I like. I tend to sit father back than I do with my gaming rig which is a single curved ultra wide. Probably better on my eyes. Most of my work is on the horizontal screen. Vertical screens are typically used for referencing information or if I use them heavily for other purposes I tend to have windows at the same level of as the horizontal screen.

Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)

The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.

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