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Comment by zievo | Hacker News Reader

First, I'll mirror my distaste for the lack of 1200 height screens. I recently purchased a laptop and had to settle for a 1080 screen over a 1200 due to the exorbitant prices. Disguisted.

However, I've been programming for 23 years and I love the wide format. I can comfortably fit two columns of code if I wish, or one column with room for other apps on the side (IM, my taskbar to the right, reference material, etc.).

Complaining because your screen is too wide makes no sense. Stop maximizing everything.

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Not too wide, too short. A few years ago 1680x1050 used to be a quasi-standard for good 15" displays. Now you're lucky to get 1600x900.

I had a 17" powerbook for years with a width of 1440 and it drove me mad because I couldn't quite get 3 80-column terminals to fit comfortably (I think I settled on 2 79-column and one 80). Today my minimum width is 1600 pixels, precisely because the way I develop involves having multiple files open, each in their own terminal, all side-by-side. I can never understand people who only have one file visible at a time, but I guess they'd probably think I'm mad too...

As for height, how many lines of code do people put in a function? In the languages I tend to use, functions of more than fifteen or twenty lines are a bit excessive, and probably need to be refactored. Why is there so much demand for vertical real-estate?

Yeah, everything is switching to the 1080p TV glass. I bought a Dell Latitude this year just before they switched as well. Those 120 pixels really make a difference.

vimdiff => wide format FTW!

>>two columns of code

And that's precisely why I bought a 20" wide one, to go with my laptop. And it has been great!

I felt that it's not the presence of width that bothers OP but lack of vertical real-estate on the screen.

I didn't get that feeling. A revealing quote:

"The astute reader will point out that there are many 15″ notebooks out there that feature 1920×1200 LCD’s. To this, I will refer you to my previous point: that widescreen sucks for software development and most business purposes."

After rereading parts of the article, I concede your point. He is hating on width, but he also complains about lack of vertical height. I may have been sleeping when I read it the first time.

I agree that vimdiff is great on a widescreen. I like it so much that I do all my development with vertical splits now (instead of horizontal splits as I used to). ^w v

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