Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

I use the Dell 49” Ultrawide [1]

Although, it must be noted, it is just two monitors stuck together, but without a middle frame getting in the way.

This does lead to a few issues with certain apps on Windows. For example, pop-up menus are designed to not span the middle, so things like auto-complete boxes either don’t appear or appear in weird places. This has been a bugbear of mine with Rider for example, which handles the middle of the screen very poorly.

Another thing is notifications. Which are usually to the right hand side of the desktop, they pop up right in your eye-line.

And finally, there’s the placement of windows in the middle - there’s no support in Windows for that. So I created an AutoHotKey script to place the current window to the left at 25% width when pressing Ctrl+1, the middle 50% when pressing Ctrl+2, and the right 25% when pressing Ctrl+3. This is super handy and allows me to maximise the use of the screen and easily tile. I have a few other keyboard shortcuts for other widths and placements.

Even with the issues, I’m not sure I’d ever go back to a multi monitor setup again. I love having my primary reading view centred in the monitor, with secondary stuff pushed to the sides, it’s much more ergonomic and natural imho

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/dell-ultrasharp-49-curved-mo...

This looks like a really sweet monitor at a reasonable price but I'm very surprised it "only" does 1440 pixel vertically: I mean, for such a big screen it's not that much. I'm on a LG 38UC99 (curved, ultra wide, 21:9) since when they came out (a few years ago already by now) and I'm a happy camper. It does 3840x1600, so a bit more vertically, due to a slightly smaller pixel pitch than yours. Overall of course mine has way less pixels.

> I love having my primary reading view centred in the monitor, with secondary stuff pushed to the sides, it’s much more ergonomic and natural imho

Others with ultra wide in this thread mentioned the same. It's how I do it too. The center area is used more than the rest. I often work in a "3 columns of 1280x1600 each" layout.

I'm on Linux so I use a tiling window manager to manage all the windows placement / type of layout / virtual desktops (for in addition to the 3840x1600 pixels I also use about 12 virtual desktops, each always arranged in the same consistent way).

Have a look at Microsoft's PowerToys Display zones. It allows you to split up your monitors into zones which you can then drag windows into to make them snap. I have a few zones configured for 3 windows and 2 windows and swap between them when appropriate.

Thanks for the suggestion, however I tried them all (screen zoning /tiling apps), and found every solution wanting. I can’t remember what my particular issue was with PoewrToys, but I know I gave it a try.

The solution I have is perfect for me, so that’s not something I’m looking to resolve.

My single biggest issue are apps that consider the middle of the screen an ‘edge’. Still, the benefits outweigh the pain points for me.

Fancyzone tiling is awesome, you can override win + arrow to each zone and save the position, You can even expand the zone if you drop the window in the middle of zone which makes another layer of combination easily. It has pretty extensive fine tuning options.

I'm using it with 3 monitors with different size and dpi/scaling and can't really imagine go back to the days without it.

Have you tried the Monitor Splitting functionality from DisplayFusion (1)? I do not know of any other software capable of this. If anyone does know an alternative for this functionality let us know.

(1) https://www.displayfusion.com/Features/MonitorSplitting/

This [1] is a nice AHK window manager. Win+UpLeft moves the current window, Win+DownRight resizes it, and WinSpace centers. Makes it easy to compose resizing & moving to get exactly what you need. Vertical is 50% increments, horizontal has increments at 0%, 33%, 50%, 66%, and 100%, though ofc you can customize cause its AHK. Only works with 1 monitor though.

[1] https://autohotkey.com/board/topic/79338-simple-window-posit...

P.S. ty for LangExt :)

> P.S. ty for LangExt :)

My pleasure :)

I’ll share my AHK script when I’m back in front of my PC.

Has some other stuff in it, but the screen positioning should be obvious.

https://gist.github.com/louthy/97c7d1725f888b6166d1bd63c7496...

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