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Comment by tejaswiy | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that you mention multiple monitors. Despite all cases made for programmer productivity and screen real-estate, I find that having a browser window up, starting at me in my second monitor while I try to code on my main screen is incredibly distracting. I've yet to figure out how to use the browser purely for work related stuff without hopping on YC / Reddit to see what's happening, so I'm just going with single monitor for now.

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What do you code? I have plenty of things to have open in a second monitor and none of them are distractions. If I have a browser open it's because I'm coding a page or I'm looking up documentation on some library I'm using. Otherwise I might have a terminal open to start/stop services or edit a second file. I might be doing SQL queries (or performing Redis commands, etc). I find the 2nd monitor to be a huge boom to productivity.

Mostly it's just the Android / iOS docs or stackoverflow up to help me out. But the urge to hit Cmd-T is just too bad.

If it's just documentation, try reading it in w3m in the terminal or inside Emacs. The improved keyboard control is a nice bonus too.

The most important use case that I've found for multiple monitors is for debugging (code on one screen, app on the other). This makes debugging much much faster. Also, having one monitor dedicated to server stats/logs etc is useful.

I use multiple Firefox profiles to help with this: personal, work stuff (non-dev), API docs, and dev. I have different add-ons for each--e.g., NoScript in the personal profile and Firebug in the dev profile.

I'm never tempted to open Reddit/HN/email/etc in my work-related profiles because I hate the idea of polluting my browser history.

The other key to this, for me, is virtual desktops that roughly correspond to the FF profiles. There's at least a little effort involved in switching desktops, but sometimes I need to shut down the personal FF instance, too.

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