I don't understand the need for more than one monitor. Just setup your desktop so you can switch virtual workspaces with a key combination. It's faster than turning your head.
Virtual workspaces and multiple monitors are unrelated. The former provides multiple working layers, the latter extends the size of those working layers. Both can be great.
I use them all. It's so nice to have my IDE, documentation, 2 terminals, CI status, Slack, music, source control, diffs, etc all visible at once.
Not only is it faster to my move my eyeballs than key combo to another desktop, it's about having all the info visible at once.
Your comment is like saying "Why bother having 16 registers in your CPU? Just use a single register and go out to cache every time you need a new value."
What does it take to run all of that these days? Can you manage with two video cards?
https://multimonitorcomputer.com/index.php is a good resource.
And as a bonus, you're helping to save the planet as you're not burning energy for monitors you're not looking at.
Another bonus is that you don't feel under-equipped anytime you move to a different computer (or a laptop).
By the way, I'm curious: how do you quickly know which screen has keyboard focus without manually scanning all your screens? And how do you quickly switch between windows?
As for the swiping motion and "human vision can only see a little bit at a time", you're right, but I can see motion and changes in things pretty well on the edges.
Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting - enough that I might forget what I'm doing. Turning my head to the right (I tend to work on my left monitor) is a much less mentally confusing experience.
To add to that, right now, I have Hacker News open to the left-most, taking up half the screen, Slack in the center, and then the documentation for a new feature taking up the whole right screen. That means that my docs are a slight turn of the head away, and no distracting animations. When I close this window after completing this message, I'll easily be able to replace Slack and Firefox with my IDE (which will be split down the middle with two documents open concurrently), and I'll be able to go right to work, and my spec sheet will still be to the right of my vision and ready to be developed against.
If the coding gets really, really complicated, I'll be able to easily have 3 windows open, side by side by side, at the width of the window I like (around 120 columns), all in a comfortable range.
I am perfectly capable, also, of picking up my laptop and going off to the couch - I did it last night for a change in scenery - and working from there; but, I prefer the real-estate that a 1440p and a 1080p (of different sizes) next to each other provides me.
What kind of animation does your OS use? For me, on Gnome, the transition is instantaneous (no animation). Switching between workspaces is snappy.
Also, if you change tabs in your browser, then you also have "the whole world changing in front of you". I'm curious what exactly makes a virtual desktop not pleasant to use for you.
There's also to do with the frequency of the action. I don't open new tabs very much; and, when I do, I tend to already be distracted and doing something off-hand, like looking at Reddit. Deep in work, it's far more distracting and would be far, far more regular.
As for relevant operating system:
* OS X
* Linux (Mint, generally)
Also, sometimes I like to play music videos on youtube while doing other stuff and it would be nice not to have to context switch away from the concert. Really, there are quite a few handy applications for a separate physical display.
I use my phone in a cradle as a second screen but it's not ideal.
When I'm editing video or photos I can keep the document open and filling the main screen with tools right next door on the second display.
Lots of reasons I like a second screen, mainly so I can see both desktops at once (rather than flipping between them). Its usefulness just depends on your workflow.
I think it's the same with tab management in the browser. I average 4-5 tabs open at a time, never really going above 10. But many of my friends are rolling with 80+ tabs at a time.
I setup my screens to associate with what task I have for that screen.
One for my RDP to my workstation I use for Config Manager and Corp Domain tasks, One for Azure and Intune tasks and my laptop screen for web browsing and email tasks.
I'm thinking of getting a third extra screen now for the VM tooling I'm doing. but that might just live on my RDP screen.