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Comment by oblak | Hacker News Reader

I remember when this was posted. I agree with Linus.

Most monitors have been wider than taller for many years. Yet, people insist on putting silly horizontal task bars up and down, thus making the problem even worse.

My mind is blown on an almost daily basis when some of our junior developers shares their screen with me.

Two of them consistently have:

1. horizontal task bar

2. display scaling set to 125% or worse (1080 native)

3. a terminal launched from VSCode (whaaaaaaaaaat) they leave on the bottom

That setup leaves them with a total of 30 lines of code. Literally more than 50% of their desktop remains unused most of the time. I don't want to force my opinions on them but stuff like this takes its toll and triggers my OCD. Only it's not an OCD, I just can't see shit

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What's wrong with 2? People can have troubles to read small text..

It’s the default on many laptops and is often completely inappropriate

What's wrong about it tho?

You can increase the font size if you have trouble reading. Scaling the whole UI makes everything bigger, including elements that you don't read. Also depending on the OS scaling can be implemented more or less well and efficiently.

Unfortunately, Mac (integer scaling) and web (with the takeover of 1px[*]) have driven this UI concept that everything has to be scaled up for High-DPI screens. And early Gtk+ 2.* versions would gladly take any font size and resize UI elements so the label fit.

[*] though in all honesty, 1px as a relative measure of angular size is fine, it's just very badly named — I was hoping web designers would switch to ems in early days of the web, allowing users to control everything through font size directly — but that would still require some smartness not to increase padding too much with large fonts: basically, we'd want something like flexible spacing a-la TeX's hskip/vskip/hglue/vglue but catering to the screen and nuances screens possess.

Almost no UI (including web pages) is designed to work well with custom font sizes today. It's a definite win of form over function, or at the very least, recognition that designers are unable to design truly fluid/responsive interfaces that they like the look of.

Gnome still allows you to make use of gnome-tweaks to adjust just the font sizes, but you still run into issues because spacing can be too small (thus I tend to run with 125% scaling and 1.4-1.5x font sizes on HighDPI screens).

If they're on a 1080p monitor, agreed scaling shouldn't be needed, but anything above 1440p (unless the monitor is absolutely enormous) really does need to be scaled at at least 125%. Otherwise you'll get closer and closer to the monitor to read it without even realizing it

1) Like 100% of the people whose upgraded to Windows 11 since it’s now mandatory. 2) Nobody’s does scale up for for fun. It’s to be able to see what’s written. Especially when it means getting under « 1080p » real estate. 3) Terminals in IDEs are buggy (at least VSCode and JetBrains). Vertical terminals in IDE are _super_ buggy. But terminal in IDEs are integrated with your current workflow. So you are basically saying that they should not use an IDE and … it’s an uninteresting debate.

> 1. horizontal task bar

That's something I honestly never thought about. I'll try it on the side for the next week, thanks for sharing the tip!

> 2. display scaling set to 125% or worse (1080 native)

Be grateful that your vision is still great I think. I have Hacker News on 125% because it's hard to read for me when it's smaller than this.

I finally broke down and got progressive lenses recently (one of my better decisions). However that means only a small portion of the monitor is in clear focus. So I also bought dedicated computer glasses (basically my regular distant prescription backed off by about 1 diopter) -- second best decision I made. Now I can finally go back to a non-zoomed screen.

> So I also bought dedicated computer glasses (basically my regular distant prescription backed off by about 1 diopter)

That's very interesting and something I never really heard about before. Thank you for sharing that, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer so dedicated glasses would make a lot of sense.

> 1. horizontal task bar

I use an horizontal task bar, out of habits and default parameters, I guess. However, I considered putting it on the side, haven't tried it seriously, but I do like having the title of the tasks and that would probably not be so comfortable vertically.

There are only so many lines of code my brain can handle anyway and I don't think the screen height is not the bottleneck.

I have my task bar autohide and haven’t used it in years. Seriously, I never see it. Between cmd+tab and Alfred to launch apps it’s just redundant.

Ever since Vista, I've set the task bar to be "XP" style. Small icons, and not grouping windows, ever. I don't get the point of needing to click twice to switch between explorer windows or whatever.

I don't know why the huge, pointless icons are the default.

3. VSCode has the ability to interact with the console (for example automatically attach a node debugger whenever you run something calling node in that console), so that shouldn't necessarily automatically be scoffed at.

You'd hate my display which is often in 9:16 mode :-)

Genuine question: What’s wrong with 3?

I mostly don’t need my terminal after getting docker up and running, and if I just want to view the output, I can always open it (Control + V).

And I usually have vscode and chrome open.

> What’s wrong with 3?

You may have missed the "[that] they leave on the bottom" part of 3. It sounds like you don't leave your terminal open/visible unless you press ^v

If you leave it there, it eats vertical space.

I usually don't like IDE terminals, they don't do anything that you can't do in a real terminal, but comes with all kinds of problems that wouldn't be accepted on a single purpose program. But that's my preference, yours is fine too. The only real problem is leaving stuff eating up a portion of the screen when you are not using.

They have one feature that I like, at least in VSCode terminal: if you click on something that resembles a compilation error (filename:line) it will open the editor on that file on that line. That work with every compiler/tool and it's useful.

Other than that, I don't like to leave my editor to switch to a terminal. Thus when I develop I usually use the VSCode terminal because it's more practical, to compile, run tests, use git (yes, I know that VSCode has git functionalities built in... I find the terminal more practical and fast)

Horizontal task bar takes up much less space.

> 1. horizontal task bar

That is what makes the most sense if you want to have as much information there as possible.

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