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Comment by compscistd | Hacker News Reader

I feel like HN as a whole want blogs to come back, and part of that is well written exposition (the technical details) followed by near-outlandish opinions that tend to generate discussion. It's more fun, it leads to more conversation (here we are!), and clarifies our own values.

I think three monitors is distracting, but that whole community discussion gave me the opportunity to compare how I use a multi-monitor setup compared to others.

I generally dislike how fonts are rendered at floating-point scaling or lower resolutions, but I too just learned to live with it over years of ignoring it. Unfortunately, now I can't unsee it!

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> I think three monitors is distracting

Could you elaborate on this? Specifically, do you feel that having three/multiple monitors is necessarily distracting (no matter what you do with them) or just encourages distraction?

My experience is the latter, and that if I am disciplined and only put windows from one task at a time on all three, then I have no more temptation to be distracted than I usually have at my internet-enabled glowbox, but maybe I'm an outlier.

My experience is that my attention span sucks enough that there's not a functional difference between encouraging distraction and being necessarily distracting.

I do basically all my work on my laptop without an external display. I use two displays for some specific tasks where I need to look at two things at once.

So it needs more discipline to use them, and I need to apply discipline for so many things already. I'm much better off with just the one screen.

As for me, three monitors is just too much information. There's no thing I do that requires me to see so many things at once. I do make extensive use of virtual desktops instead.

I like one large 4k monitor right in front of me, and the window manager is set to allow splitting windows in thirds. Laptop off to the side with music, terminal, and other auxiliary stuff.

For me, I can't use three monitors. It just takes too much brain-cycles to process and remember "where that window is".

I can process two fine: one "the workspace" the other "the reference/product/outcome/tests".

I tried really hard to teach myself structure, but with three monitors, I find myself always loosing windows, losing the cursor etc. Hacks like "find my cursor" (not default on Linux) help, but I'd rather have a clean mental map of where my cursor, focus and windows are, at all times.

What stuck best was having the third monitor hold the API/documentation/reference but still, the mental power to keep all my whereabouts mapped in my head were just too much.

Also note that I went from one to three monitors, so this is not "just too used to two monitors to ever change" it was the other way around.

Ubuntu has nice tiling features without requiring tiling for everything ([meta]-[→] and [meta]-[←]) that allow my now-ingrained use of two monitors on my laptop-screen when I'm somewhere without a second monitor. Another thing that I disliked about my three-monitor-setup: it does not map in any way to a single monitor: using virtual desktops worked, somewhat but still too different.

>I feel like HN as a whole want blogs to come back

Blogs never left— they may have withered to near-nothingness after the same exact people who claim to want them abandoned them, but they’re still here.

I may be wrong but I believe the people who claim to want blogs abandoned them for sites like Hacker News.

HN is a link aggregator that gives a lot of blogs more exposure than they would otherwise get. I would say something like Twitter (micro-blogging and social networking) has contributed to decline of blogs.

If you are going to blame anyone, it's easiest to blame Google's failed EEE attempt on the blogging world with sunset of Reader and attempt to push everyone to Google+. There were so many blogs and meta-blogs I saw directly lost in that fumbled transition. In trying to build their own Facebook, Google did irreparable harm to the blogging world in the process.

I'm certainly no fan of Google, to say the very least. That said, they've kept Blogger relatively unchanged, which is nice.

At least count your blessings that making blogging platforms must not impress promotion committees nearly as much as writing new chat apps.

"Relatively unchanged" is such an interesting POV. It's been in such a stasis that I pretty much assume it is as dead as LiveJournal. Maybe not in literally the same way that LiveJournal got shuffled around in a shell game to some strange Russian owners, but in a very metaphorical sense.

At one point Blogger in the early oughts was ahead of the pack in leading mainstream acceptance and usage of blogs. At one point my feed list was over half Blogger sites, but today I can think of only a few Blogger-hosted blogs left at all in my feed list, none of them have been updated recently, and those that have updated recently were claimed by spammers and (sadly) dropped from my list.

I can't imagine there's much more than a skeleton crew at Blogger keeping the lights on, and I would be unsurprised, if in pushing the metaphor to the LiveJournal thing, to learn that they were being kept in the Bay Area equivalent of Siberia by some half-mad state actors that need Blogger's zombie to keep its current undead behavior in some strange psy ops nightmare.

I just can’t function optimally without 3 monitors:

1 for my full screen IDE: 3 files side by side, multiple terminals

1 with 2 browser windows: my product (a web app), and another with specs, stack overflow, google

And my macbook’s screen with slack or email.

Whenever I have 2 monitors or less, I find myself switching windows around all the time! With 3 I just move my eyes and mouse.

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