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dgellow

What do you do with 8 terminal open at the same time? I can never focus on more than one or two at a time.

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good question!

depending on the project, it'll normally be browser for reference (or if its web based testing as well, but thats rare)

then I have about between 1/2 and 2/3rds of the screen space left to have terminals in.

I'll have one/two long terminals open with vim for the main file(s) I'm working on, then 1-4 smaller terminals for running the program/tests. if its a big project, then more terminals for reference (ie library one, library two etc.).

Think of it more as having a really big desk, with loads of copies of the same reference book open to different pages. Its quicker to glance than it is to alt-tab. For me (and i'm not claiming this is a universal trait) that flash of screens where we switch context from one full screen to the other makes me loose context on what I'm working on.

I have virtual monitors as well, all split into contexts, so one will have email/slack/$messenger one will have "personal" internets (ie timewasting sites) and a professional browser, thats logged into company services. If I'm doing graphics, then drawing/editing screens as well.

I used to be a proponent of many monitors. I bought a matrox parhelia new to support triple monitors when they came out. (yes I am that old). However due to the way my mind works, I found that with three screens I would end up in a spinlock with two browsers open, one in each monitor, and not do any work.

My eyesight is bad, and I use a 15" laptop with about 300 views open at a time. I feel no need for a bigger screen.

I keep one window on screen at any time, full screen. I use 2 sets of 16 virtual desktops, tmix, emacs and brave. Maybe 10 instances of each app, and of within each maybe ten tabs. So that's a total of about 300 windows. It gives me zero visibility problems. I much prefer using my hands to change whatn I'm looking at instead of my neck.

Surely vim can manage its own display and you don't need multiple terminals each running their own instance?

Vim can, but why in the world would I have vim do that itself when that means I have to learn/use both vims windowing system and my window managers windowing system? What advantage does it give me...

I spend more time interacting with Emacs than I do my window system, so I am quite happy arranging terminals, database clients, REPLs and code inside that, and there are huge advantages to all those being able to communicate frictionlessly. It'd be very annoying having to constantly multitask.

I feel like emacs makes a much better case for this than vim, because it actually takes advantage of everything being one program (at the expense of rewriting the world, and basically being it's own operating system).

It can, and sometimes its quite useful. If I have long terminals, I can :split, which is a nice option to have.

However a lot of the time the Vims are there for reference.

Same. I also stopped using two monitors because it was distracting.

I'm debugging a embedded system, and have three different minicom sessions going on, looking at the simultaneous output of the various consoles.

In general, I often have up to 10 tabs open on Gnome terminal, and a GNU screen session in each with up to 10 screens. Maintaining lots of context.

Within a single GNU screen session, I'll often have a build window, some editing windows for code, editing windows for config files, etc.

Maintain context. I might have several terminals up, each ssh'd to a different server. At least one terminal per software project. It helps that I use a tiling manager, so I can keep them all visible at the same time.

In Emacs I have tens of eshells open, not to mention SSH sessions, etc! I use one shell per task and then context switch using Emacs buffer switching machinery.

"Microservices, son!"

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