Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers | Hacker News Reader

Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

sprocketfox.io

860 pointsghuntley419 comments

This is interesting but the author considers only one degree of freedom, "roll".

Equally important are "pitch" and "yaw".

"pitch" is necessary to accommodate another kind of rotation, known in HCI as "slouch".

"yaw" is important because sometimes your code is so elegant and impressive, that you need people walking by to see it more than you need to see it yourself. You use yaw to rotate your monitor away, toward the hallway or window.

Author could just write a script that takes slope input from a Wiimote attached to the back of the monitor & sets xrandr accordingly.

3DOF?

doesn't cover the case where the desk itself is sloped.

Or the building is sloped, which is tricky because it's not clear whether it's best to align to the room or gravity.

...My last office was a "listed" building, in both the nautical and historic sense.

I mean, unless you're working in the leaning tower of Pisa, I can't imagine any change of tilt would be in any way useful.

An unmodified desk could have up to 3 inches of difference in height end to end, but to be fair the warped floors contributed to this more than the building structure.

> I can't imagine any change of tilt would be in any way useful.

It was somewhat useful for ball games.

I can confirm. Currently dealing with a lot of post WFH era back issues which commenced shortly after working all day from my 1890 construction brownstone apartment. The floor warping is real.

or moving.

Need to add velocity, acceleration, direction.

6DOF, get velocity in there.

One of the funniest paragraphs I have read here!

Could stretch the "yaw" into a "yawn" which is the typical response when you showcase your elegant and impressive code to family and friends.

Sir, you wound me deeply... yet you speak truth.

When I was younger, I'd write code and print it out to share with friends and family with the most disappointing looks returned. Honestly, I have no idea why and how I have persisted in this field for so long given how isolating it can be.

Even now, I am writing my own programming language (for board games), and I've run into the sales/marketing problem head-on.

What would a language for board games achieve that a good framework wouldn’t?

I can see a space for something that's largely a DSL with restricted syntax for defining objects, but offers hooks and escapes into code, itself with syntax and abstractions designed to be as graspable as possible, for defining behavior. You could give it to designers and let them focus mostly on building games, not on learning a general-purpose language - think something like Inform 7, but with a different UX target.

A part of my problem is relying on "programming language" when I should really focus on "real-time collaborative database" with "multi-user workflow transactions"

http://www.adama-lang.org/

On the other hand, the jawns from our co-workers clearly are stress responses from seeing our obviously superiorly elegant code, and the feeling of inferiority it leads to.

Yeah that's like Louis and the rest of the family pretending to eat and enjoy Stewie's sand cake (complete with plastic toys for decoration): "Mmmh yummie, Stewie is a great cook"

If it doesn't suffer from gimbal lock, is it even really a monitor?

not an issue anymore thanks to qled!

I know that you are writing in jest, but the very concept that any amount of slouching is tolerable to someone in this profession should be outrageous. We spend decades deforming our backs to sit in chairs. The least we can do is to promote the idea of an international "Insufficiently Ergonomic Office Chair Bonfire Day".

Sit with your butt on the edge of your chair (don't use the back rest at all) ... Your back will be naturally straight and your core muscles will gain endurance. I learned this by using an exercise ball as a chair for six months.

That's nonsense, I'm perfectly capable of slouching without the assistance of a back rest.

Op must have an iron rod for a spine. I naturally slouch lying down. Cats are less fluid than my posture at 4pm-second-wind, two-screens-of-code-and-one-of-data full-crunch-engaged mode.

Get a standing desk and put on something with a beat. Same style, but it's better for your spine and you don't need fidget toys for when you're pegging your CPU.

the only solution appear to be a reverse standing desk. you get one of those reclinable planks to hang yourself upside down at an incline and have gravity fix your posture

Ok, we found a graduate of Tom Cruise's programming school (Mission Impossible) .

As a musician coder, I always sit that way in chairs.

chairs are the past. couches are the future. slouch away.

You don't want to burn all that plastic, not without a gas mask at least. But hey, recreational axe throwing by the hour is apparently a thing and so also are places where you literally go and pay to break stuff, I think there's a niche in the intersection of those where angle grinders and shitty chairs both fit. Just want to make sure your PI and liability cover is good.

Thinking "axe" and "break stuff", there is nothing like going to split some firewood for a while to limber up away from the desk.

I've got plenty of split wood in the shed, but Beat Saber in VR has been great for this same purpose lately. The problem, I find, is stopping when I need to - it's engrossing enough that I have to set a phone alarm, and not only when I need to be back at my desk by a given time.

OK, this does look like stupid amounts of fun.

It is! Good exercise, too, I'm finding.

edit having just finished a session: And as rhythm games go, I've never played anything else quite like it. The sheer sense of immersion makes it a unique experience, and that's before you realize each map is designed to teach you to dance your way through it. As you practice a song, you learn the dance, and the process of improving your execution on every runthrough feels amazing, especially once you know the song well enough to start attaining a full-body flow state that I honestly can't find words to describe. Like programming can be, sure, but where that's purely cerebral, this has a kind of sensual physicality that programming flow just doesn't match in my experience.

It's a little like back when I was young and used to dance in clubs, and a little like playing a musical instrument really well, but mainly it's its own thing that I can't really describe but can unreservedly recommend to anyone who can afford a Quest 2 and find 10x10 feet or so of clear floor space.

There's a lot of other things you can do in VR too I guess? I haven't really bothered with them yet, though. :D

Off-topic

> but the very concept that any amount of slouching is tolerable to someone in this profession should be outrageous. We spend decades deforming our backs to sit in chairs.

Would you be interested in a tool which reminds you to take a walk at regular intervals without any action from you when you're seated and immersed with work?

I'm trying to validate the need to refine and make my 'Butt Pomodoro'[1] more accessible.

[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered-po...

I was literally just thinking about something like this yesterday evening. Normally I let my empty tea/coffee/water/"need to go to the bathroom" remind me to get up, but that is super unreliable, of course. I was contemplating some bracelet/rfid reader that didn't let me stay in my desk chair for too long before alerting me.

I'm surprised that the button-switch under butt pillow worked as well as it did in my setup, I've been using it for over a year but I've made the software-setup unnecessarily complicated and so I'm rewriting it to be a single module with some bells and whistles.

RFID bracelet would work too, But I wanted my setup completely unattended. Please send me an email if you'd like to be updated about rebuild of Butt Pomodoro.

How do you tackle the problem of “alarm blindness”?

The moment I think about a ‘Butt Pomodoro’ I picture myself being 90% disciplined and 10% saying “ok yes but not right now: I’m (doing something with a critical deadline/in the zone/especially lazy)”

And after a few of those, the reminder becomes background noise.

Good question.

That's why I integrated pomodoro framework and didn't make a plain butt triggered alarm and so Butt Pomodoro is a time-management + health application not just a activity alarm.

I was already using Pomodoro schedule for time-management/productivity albeit triggering it manually now Butt Pomodoro helps me to trigger it automatically and pomodoro breaks are now for walks.

"Pitch" is actually a useful rotation. Displays should be placed as far away as practical, with their top edge roughly at eye level, and tilted so that the bottom of the display is closer to the body than the top. Eyes have an easier time both focusing and converging closer in the bottom part of the field of view.

Viewers should sit up, with their backs and necks straight and plumb, and look around at different parts of the display by moving the eyes rather than tilting the head.

The top edge should only be at eye level of the screen is small enough. With a large 4k you want your eyes around the center because everything above that is the "upper monitor"

For comfort you do not want to be looking substantially upward or tilting your head back. It’s much better for your eyes to put the display lower and look down (by swiveling your eyes, not your whole head) for the bottom part instead.

For typing it works well with a large display to put the bottom of the display barely above the desk, push it back as far as you can (constrained by your workspace) and tilt it backwards near the top, and position the desk/chair so that the desktop is at roughly waist height (let your upper arms dangle loosely at your sides with your elbows close to the body and bent about 90°, keep your wrists straight, and position your fingertips at the tops of the keys of a keyboard resting on the desk).

I have a 27" display ("5K") and the top ends up just slightly below eye level. If you have a 40" display or something the top will probably end up a bit above eye level.

Or just zoom in (increase font size) enough so that you do not need to sqeeze/focus in order to read.

Your eyes need to focus and converge on the display surface irrespective of the distance or orientation of the display and irrespective of the font size.

But as a general rule, the further the display surface the less your eye muscles need to work. So if you can put your display 3m away from your eyes that is better than putting it 30cm away.

On my desk, about 90cm from my face is the furthest I can manage, but if you have more space in your work room, by all means put the display significantly further than that.

> with their top edge roughly at eye level

I'd heard that this advice has changed, and that the centre of the screen being roughly at eye level is recommended. Though maybe that was wrong?

There is a ton of terrible advice out there, including from official standards organizations. Office ergonomics is a mess, with widespread normalization of injury-causing practices, and a lot of poorly designed/implemented research uninformed by any understanding of human anatomy.

If you find some particular screen placement personally comfortable though, go for it. Keyboard design and use is generally a much bigger problem.

I prefer to work with a single large external monitor. If my device is a laptop I keep it in clamshell mode when attached to an external monitor. I find switching applications with keyboard shortcuts and focusing on one thing at a time has improved my productivity. Using two or more monitors made it so easy for me to get distracted. To each their own though.

I agree, I've also moved back to a single monitor. Less distraction, and for me also less neck pain as I keep what I'm focusing on straight in front of me, instead of having a monitor off to one side.

Same here. In the circumstances where I need multiple things up at once I use Windows' window tiling features to arrange things as I need. They even made this functionality better in Windows 11. I'm a big proponent of using one good monitor over any number of other monitors.

One thing that cracks me up is how many of my users request multiple monitor setups, but look at the keyboard while they type.

I tried powertoys fancy zones (from MS itself) and never looked back. Can’t tell if it will work with 11. My layout is 4 overlapping vertical full-height panes, so I can split the screen in half, or around 2:3 either way. E.g. my browser is usually x=0, w=3/5, and my vim is x=1/2, w=1/2. This way I can see the changes in 1500+-width but slightly overlapped by an editor to feel comfortable with line widths and their left margin.

What stands out in fancy zones is that these areas do not have to tile each other and may overlap. Positioning windows in there is also very UX. I couldn’t find anything close enough in linux world (well, one may always program i3 or awesome, but it’s beyond my scope of interest).

I don’t get why MS doesn’t just build it into windows, since it’s their own, free tool.

Windows 11 has a cut down version of fancy zones built in.

> powertoys fancy zones

Second FanzyZones. I've remapped the keys I could to mimic i3, and the only thing keeping it from "perfect" is keyboard shortcuts to control splitting/moving/resizing. You can toggle between pre-configured fixed zones using the keyboard, which is mostly good enough.

PowerToys also has a ton of other useful tools like a color picker, bulk file rename, and keyboard remapping (useful when using Synergy between Windows/MacOS). Highly recommend.

I miss i3 on win - do you have a how-to for that? I use powertoys but only to tweak window layout a bit.

I just remapped the super-pagedn/up keys for window switching (only next/prev instead of hjkl). Otherwise I'm using i3 on Linux, and use Synergy to move between Windows, MacOS, and Linux so it helps to have as much between the three environments consistent.

I use multiple monitors, look at the keyboard to type, and drive barefoot. 3 things that have no bearing on each other.

Yep, single 38” 3840x1600 ultrawide or 43” 4K TV for me. With a small 14” USB-C portable touch monitor as needed for testing touch and pen input.

I use a 27” 4k monitor, in unscaled mode, but I use zoom heavily on macOS (Ctrl+Scroll Wheel) - with some extra scroll cruising setup with SteerMouse on my mouse. The lets me reduce the pixel to density to that if a much larger screen on-demand to help with my eyes a bit.

You might want to check out https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer which is really nice for changing resolutions beyond what macOS lets you do using the GUI

The one thing that I dearly miss from OS X going to linux, is the 'double tap to zoom on a text container' thing that simply doesn't appear to have an equivalent on linux. Being able to double tap and zoom up on text when I'm tired after a long day is very nice.

When I ran multiple monitors I often designated one as my "communication" display, which got email/chat on it, and probably browser as well (for reference material), while the other was the active work one with the current task (usually a few terminals). I found the clearly defines areas for specific tasks was useful.

Now I work off a 40" 4k TV without magnification (I'm close to it), and I try to do similar but it's a lot more haphazard. I find that once you have a wall of pixels in front of you, putting stuff in areas helps, but it's also nice to just throw stuff around and treat it as a actual physical desktop (as it's actually about the size now).

The thing to keep in mind is that as screens get larger, maximizing to fill the whole screen makes less and less sense. I can't even see all my screen at once. I could place it farther back and scale it up, but why would I just by a smaller screen and keep it closer then? I want those pixels. I run all my browser windows at about a quarter screen size, and have that app scaled up to 125% (but not all apps), and that almost never has a problem with a site, and I have other info I care about quick saccade away.

I used to have 2 pcs, connected over synergy, for the same reason. The best part is that your cmd-tab / application switcher is local to that screen. Still looking for a similar solution on 1 laptop with 2 screens.

I've longed for a window manager that can assign different virtual desktops to different screens. Of course, there are compositing, scaling and resolution issues to overcome, but it'd be really neat to have a palette of virtual desktops that could be called up on whichever monitor was most convenient.

...and it'd make screen mirroring during presentations a breeze!

Maybe I'm not understanding what you want exactly, but it sounds like what i3 and Sway already do. Workspaces are created as needed and are specific to that monitor, so if workspace 3 is on the right monitor, you can jump to it with super-3 even if you're on the left monitor. You'd be looking at workspace 3 on the right monitor plus another workspace like 1 or 2 on the left. Each monitor displays a separate workspace which can be changed without affecting the other.

You can also define rules in the config so that certain programs will open in certain workspaces every time, and you can move the whole workspace to the other monitor (not a default keybind iirc) if desired. Good in a portrait+landscape monitor setup for if you need your browser to be wider for a little bit.

Being able to select desktops/workspaces per screen is half the solution.

The other half is allowing the selection to come from a pool of desktops/workspaces common to all screens. i.e. the opposite of what i3 and Sway do.

So given desktops/workspaces a, b and c and screens 1 and 2, the following combinations are possible:

1: a; 2: b

1: a; 2: a

1: c; 2: a

...

You can absolutely do this in i3 or sway. There aren't default keybindings for doing it, but it is easy to set up your own. I set $mod+equals to 'move workspace to output up' in i3 (or something like that -- I'm not on that machine to check). This works for me since I set up my external display to be above the laptop screen, so it effectively means 'move this workspace to the other output'. You could also specify a specific output to move to, or change what the direction is.

That's not quite what's being asked for. I think it's more like super+1 for "move workspace 1 to the current monitor". I haven't quite figured out how to do that in sway, although I'm pretty new with it.

In my scheme that move is just two key combos away, which seems fine to me, especially since it is rarely what I want. You could make it one key combo if you want, too, in a script if not in a single line.

I used to do stuff like this back in the day with Fvwm2, but less at the desktop level and more at the application level. You can set applications (windows really, and by title or id) to either be sticky to desktop or screen, etc. I had my mail client follow me no matter the virtual desktop I was on, but let other windows be anchored to the virtual desktop.

Honestly, I often miss Fvwm2 and my config in its power and simplicity, but Windows long ago became "good enough" and since the heavy apps I really care about (mail client, browser, maybe an IDE if I'm not using vim for the project) are cross platform (which they all are), as long as there's a good SSH client I'm good, and Windows Terminal plus built in OpenSSH shipped with windows works fairly well.

Check out Total Spaces (https://totalspaces.binaryage.com/) for Mac. I use this with dual monitors and love that each monitor can have its own virtual desktop.

I have my left monitor as a communications hub. It has only one virtual screen. I also keep my browser there.

I have a 3x3 grid on the right hand monitor.

That won’t work. I just want separation. Between applications. I can run multiple instances of chrome, but the is has trouble figuring out where to put what.

I’ve tried routing VNC though an ssh tunnel (doesn’t accept connection to localhost), but it’s all pretty shit.

And I really don’t like carrying 2 MacBooks around

I don’t think you can have the same desktop on both screens, but otherwise herbstluftwm allows this.

Also monitors are virtual so you can have multiple virtual monitors on one physical monitor. I want to one day try this with a 4K tv to have multiple monitor layouts.

I basically want to have real multi user. I want my dev/project to be an isolated user, also bc of software supply chain security. I want to map it to a (virtual) screen. I want to be able to share the clipboard.

I think the closest is running multiple OS X/Linux in VMs

Sway has multiseat, maybe it would be a match for your use-case, check manual for sway-input.

what i do for work is very close to what you want and its pretty easy to achieve with using lightdm and the dm-tool with the add-nested-seat command. It will start a new Xephyr X server local to your current user and attach the session manager to it. from there you just login and have the second user session in a window just like you wanted... however, i did not get clipboard sharing to work but i actually like this extra bit of isolation.... its not even hackish and performance is exactly as native because it is... its a bit harder to get sound working concurrently, but not impossible, although i never really tried. However, i use pipewires pulseaudio interface to stream audio to a remote AV receiver in the room and this should work fine in the second user session too, although as said i never bothered to try...

You could also achieve this with pure X server and several system users: X controls your display and inputs (kb/mouse), and you let different X clients from different system users display on that server (eg. set the DISPLAY env var properly, configure X server permissions with xhost utility).

Then, you use a configurable tiling manager to control which windows go where (I am sure you can even go by the user somehow, but maybe you'll need to "decorate" the client run with an env var too).

i3* does that. You specify a set of workspaces and their screens. Personally I go a step further and set programs to specific workspaces as well.

This works really nice with a docked/undocked setup. When the additional monitors are disconnected, all workspaces move to the main(laptop) display.

eg, I have workspaces 1,2,5,9 on monitor 1 and screens 3,4,6,7,8,10 on monitor 2. When undocked all 10 workspaces move to the laptop screen.

* https://i3wm.org

If using windows, Ultramon works very well,

It also works well within virtual pc's and licensing is per machine so you can use it on multiple virtual pc's at the same time as the main host, so you can multiple virtual pc's running, subject to hw abilities, and it works instantly and seemlessly, also high customisable and you can do your own commands to work with things like nVidia's mosaic.

https://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

If you have the professional line of nVidia graphics cards aka Quadro, nVidia do a command line tool for configuring a multi monitoring system upto 16 4K monitors, so you can do things like tv walls or special effects in a theme park, or just fancy desktop setups for city traders or coders. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/solutions/... https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/mosaic-utility/

I cant remember if it also does tilting like that described in this post or not, but you can certainly do a lot with mosaic run it all from shortcuts so you can instantly switch to different resolutions and layouts and the shortcuts can be used in Ultramon, for seamless operations, ie switch between 2 physical monitors and 3 monitors, all called from within ultramon. Ultramon then detects the physical monitor changes and acts accordingly.

If you are looking for a nice 3 monitor setup, I can recommended this, the Ergotron HX triple box with the HX desk mounted floating arm. https://www.ergotron.com/en-gb/products/product-details/98-0... https://www.ergotron.com/en-gb/products/product-details/45-4...

You can spend hours in front of one these, get perfectly comfortable without taking up your desk space as it clamps to the back of your desk, and when you have to do paperwork, you can push the monitors to the back of the desk.

However this gaming chair manufacturer has caught my eye, like this one, https://allimperatorworks.com/scorpion-gaming-chair-setup/

but if they ever added some batteries and motors so it can drive around, I'd get one of these for my mobile solution as it can still do 3 monitors. :-) https://allimperatorworks.com/product/iw-j20-pro/

That's exactly how xmonad works

I've found this to be the optimum as well. The fact that you can have 2 1080p monitors worth of display height stacked on top of each other is invaluable when writing code/reading docs. For the other half of the monitor I can usually split it up between a browser/target app I'm debugging and something else, which usually varies by the actual use-case.

Can recommend Nvidias nView software for partitioning the screen into work-areas. Then maximizing, by default dragging the window to a border of a work-area, but is programmable so you can select a default area, just fills the area. Only downside is that you need to patch a JNZ in their DLL where they check if you have a Quadro card and quit.

Windows 11 has some nice window management features like this built in, but I’ve found the windows power toys fancy zones to be even better. This works for all graphics cards.

Was gonna recommend PowerToys too, great tools.

Windows has PowerToys [1] with the tool FancyZones, I've used it daily for a while and in general works pretty well, it's customizable and I use it to setup "zones" for working and splitting my tools into predefined spaces on muy screens.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

FancyZones has no power over Task Manager, it is too strong!

Have you tried starting PowerToys as admin?

> maximizing to fill the whole screen makes less and less sense

I guess that was the point of having "windows" in the first place. Per TFA:

> Websites and documents usually end up with a lot of whitespace and padding around them

This only happens if you needlessly maximise; windows are supposed to fit their content, not their container†. (Yes I realise that the article is in jest, yet I see so many people complaining about "poor app/web design" when all you need to do is not maximise on a wide enough screen. I smell Horror Vacui[0])

> When I ran multiple monitors I often designated one

In my case this ends up with me having a single screen for work and the other(s) mostly unused††; the ROI of the extra screen(s) thus drops extremely quickly. With a typical two-screen symmetric setup this also means my head/eyes have a constant bias in one direction, which means RSI quite quickly. Plus having things ever so slightly move in my peripheral vision triggers my reptilian emergency reflexes which goes contra to the goal of focusing.

I've noticed that "maximisers" are typically using two or more screens as they would use windows. To be fair I'm not bashing on "maximisers" at all, I just view the thing as with coffee: there are the dippers and the non-dippers, and to each his own, but when I see people arguing/complaining I'd rather point out that they should use a setup matching their preference and not try to force others into some "enlightenment".

I do blame (in jest) the "maximiser" mindset for the flurry of apps with huge "content" that basically forces you to maximise yet end up reinventing ad-hoc window management inside the app, only poorly and inconsistently.

† Which is the default behaviour of the "maximise" (a.k.a "zoom" in Apple HIG parlance) green plus traffic light on macOS, that you now have to reach to with Option.

†† The only use case I found possibly interesting is looking at documentation over there, which in practice I found equally efficient to have on either a separate virtual desktop, or on an iPad.

[0]: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2014/11/11/horror_vacui/

I use a laptop and I make heavy use of workspaces. I generally don't use an external monitor at all. However, when working at a desk, I use an external keyboard and trackpad, and put the laptop on a stand.

I dislike plugging into a monitor because it I hate the chaos of resizing everything. When I'm on the large monitor I unconsciously expand things; then when I switch back everything is on top of everything else or expanded beyond the window edges or reflowed or what have you.

I say this having worked with applications where you truly need an external monitor: image editing (where you put all your extra palettes on the extra monitor, and DAWs, where timeline and mixer views take up a full monitor each. Programming isn't like that.

Totally this. I've been using Linux for so long time that I haven't realised Windows has that feature as well - when I've learned about this and WSL has been introduced I've switched immediately :)

I use two 27" 4k Monitors in landscape mode arranged vertically. That way I have one primary monitor just in front of me and some extra space when I need it.

Having the secondary screen above the primary means you won't have neck pain from looking to the one side all the time. In addition, it is quite relaxing to lean back and watch a presentation/video on the secondary screen.

The biggest downside is the position of a webcam. I placed it between the monitors with a 3D printed holder. However, that is certainly not an optimal solution.

That’s exactly what i do as well, i just gave up on the bottom inch of my top monitor with the webcam in the way

Looking up will be a bigger problem for neck and will strain the eyes more.

The upper edge of the display should be on eye level: humans are much more comfortable looking down than up.

Not if you can recline the chair

You are right, that looking down is more comfortable than looking up when sitting straight.

However, I like it better to look up than to look left or right and my reasoning is that it is symmetrical. Therefore, I prefer to have the secondary screen above the primary.

I am exactly the same way. I have a 50" 4k TV in my basement that exists solely as a monitor for my laptop(s). TVs have the advantage of being ridiculously cheap, and there's no law saying that you can't just plug into the HDMI port and use it as a monitor. The refresh-rate is so-so, but since all I don't really play games, it's not a problem.

Having a 50" TV lets me sit pretty far away from the screen and also gives me plenty of room to put a million applications next to each other which (at least for me) helps me avoid being distracted. I also have a lot of issues reading small text [1], so having a big screen allows me to make the text gigantic while not sacrificing a ton of screen real estate.

It's honestly great; if I ever am forced to work in an office again, I'm going to insist that the company purchase me the equipment for a similar setup.

[1] I'm reasonably certain that I'm not dyslexic, but I do find that reading off a screen is substantially easier for me when I use extremely big text. This is part of the reason most my book reading is either on the Kindle or the large-print vision-impaired versions of books.

If you haven't, get your vision tested by a good optometrist.

I had an unknown-to-me astigmatism with otherwise perfect vision. I hadn't seen an eye doctor in (ever?) so I don't know when it started.

I didn't notice I was having the problems you describe until I got some corrective lenses to use only when I'm on the computer. Blew my mind.

I wear glasses/contact lenses already, so I get my eyes checked regularly. I've had pretty bad eyesight since I was nine years old, and an astigmatism in my left eye since I was at least nineteen. Theoretically at least, my contact lenses correct for it.

I honestly don't think it's a vision issue though; I don't have issues identifying the letters, and I don't have trouble reading the words or parsing sentences, I seem to have a lot of trouble keeping track of which line I'm on when I'm reading stuff with relatively small font. When I have large font, I don't have this issue, and I can read relatively quickly without a ton of issues.

I did. He told me that I just have the normal symptoms of getting old. I miss my 20s when I could read tiny text on a 19inch screen (CRT). Now I magnify everything, 250% really messages with a lot of websites, but at least I can read. (I'm writing this on a pinebook pro, so the screen is not large to begin with)

If you want to use a TV as a computer monitor, you should make sure that your TV doesn't do chroma subsampling. Otherwise text is noticeably off.

I went from 3 large monitors to 1 large & laptop screen to only a laptop screen. It's enough.

Definitely agree. Multiple monitors distract.

I agree I just like to add for development it'd be nice to at least a terminal window and an editor open side by side. In case of web dev the browser pointing to localhost and the editor side by side. I don't understand why an "ideal monitor for programmers" would need to have space for Twitter.

I work with the KDE virtual desktops grid with a 3x2 arrangement and wrap around on a 32" curved screen. I've found it very useful to put the same windows in the same grid squares and have hotkeys to easily go between. I know exactly the keystrokes ahead of time to get to the window I want and don't have to move my neck to get there. I can tile them, since I've got plenty of space on the one large screen, but usually the 6 virtual desktops are good enough. I've tried multiple monitors before, but couldn't get into it.

That's pretty much exactly my setup. On top of that I make sure I can do most important things with just my left hand: I use Ctrl+F1/2/3 as is default in KDE (Firefox on F1, editor of F2 usually), but then I rebind stuff to the Windows key: Win+W maximises a window, Win+A tiles to the left and Win+S tiles right. Kinda unrelated, but I also rebind Konsole's "Clear Scrollback and Reset" to Ctrl+Shift+X because I use it before running compilers and stuff, so I can easily find the actual start of the command's output.

> Using two or more monitors made it so easy for me to get distracted.

I have a desktop with three monitors and a laptop with one, and I don't notice any difference in distractibility. It's a discipline problem, not a technical one, and so you should solve it on a personal level and not a technical one.

I mean, think about it. If you "unlock" the ability to use multiple monitors at once without getting distracted, "it's free real estate" - you have more space to work with, and there's empirical evidence to suggest that that results in increased productivity. Programming involves a lot of consulting documentation and using multiple tools at once - it's very amenable to multiple monitors (as opposed to, say, writing a novel).

> It's a discipline problem, not a technical one,

Sure, agreed.

> and so you should solve it on a personal level and not a technical one.

Why, when a technical one suffices?

I've not personally seen much of a productivity increase over two 24"-ish screens and a single 32" 4K screen myself. I don't have the physical desk space for two of those (nor do I think it would be particularly useful for me)

> Why, when a technical one suffices?

Because if you're programming then the imposed limitation forcing you to constantly switch between windows almost certainly reduces your productivity. Do you never find yourself jumping back and forth between two or three documentation pages (library API, manpage, language spec, whatever), one or more pieces of example code, and one or more files with code that you're editing? Plus a window for build tooling? I find having that all visible at once in dedicated locations to be incredibly convenient, much more like working on a physical bench top.

> I find having that all visible at once in dedicated locations to be incredibly convenient

That’s a reason for seeking out a solution with large enough display area and sufficient resolution. That doesn’t necessarily require multiple monitors.

I wasn't meaning to differentiate between those two approaches. The original complaint seemed to be that having too many windows visible was leading to distraction. Honestly I found that claim perplexing. If it was only when they were spread across multiple physical monitors (as opposed to a single very large one) that would be even stranger to me.

At the end of the day though I admit that it comes down to whatever works for the individual to maximize their effectiveness.

> there's empirical evidence to suggest that that results in increased productivity

Can you share this evidence?

The thing is that one can only focus on a single monitor at a time. So productivity IME really depends on your windows manager. If I can quickly jump from code to documentation while looking at the same pixels without moving my neck or eyes, that seems like it would be more productive than changing focus to another screen and back.

I've been working on a single 1080p laptop display for years now, running Linux with bspwm. I've tried hooking up external displays to this setup, but I haven't found it increased my productivity. Sure, the extra real estate was nice, but shifting focus between monitors detracted from the experience enough that I always went back to a single screen. The comfort of having a portable setup and being able to work from anywhere is also a plus.

Example of a web developer:

Monitor #1: The page Monitor #2: The code Monitor #3: Mail, chat etc.

You can drop the third one, but at least two is kinda required. You can't just shove #1 and #2 on a single monitor or the page layout won't match the user's.

Or I can put the browser and the code editor on different workspaces and instantly switch between them with the press of a key.

It's not faster than flicking your eyes to the other screen. And you can't type in workspace #1 while looking at workspace #2 :)

Debatable, my sway setup transitions instantly :) Everyone has their preferred workflow. I personally switched back from two monitors to a 15" laptop screen

You assume that there are no scenarios where you want two windows up at the same time; e.g. for comparison or quick reference.

I have a custom setup where I can quickly switch between windows and applications using keyboard shortcuts and save e.g. cursor positions.

I still prefer having the relevant material on-screen rather than switching between them. And it's due to the reason previously mentioned: for me it's faster to reference material that is on-screen at the same time rather than switching between them.

Perhaps this has something to do with the type of code bases one works with? I work quite a bit on legacy apps, where one has to reference both documentation, tests and git history (when it's of value), as well as a browser window to actually run the code. That'a already a lot of things to be switching between.

I do run into those situations of course, where I want to see two windows side-by-side, but it's very rare and almost always temporary. Most of my windows run full screen, and if I need to focus on something else I just switch to it. It's important that this switch happens very quickly, so my window manager configuration has no delays, and every window is a quick keyboard shortcut away (either on a different workspace, "alt-tabbed" on the same workspace, or quickly accessible via rofi).

This workflow completely removes the need for a separate screen. A larger screen and higher resolution would be nice to have, but not for productivity reasons. I've found a 15.6" 1080p display to be sufficient with this setup, even though I have other screens I could use at the same time. It boils down to personal preference, but I doubt there's some "empirical evidence" that using more than one screen objectively leads to higher productivity.

> I mean, think about it. If you “unlock” the ability to use multiple monitors at once without getting distracted, “it’s free real estate”

If the distraction problem isn’t from size but strictly—as was described—from multiple monitors, this isn’t true; multiple monitors are cheaper than single monitors for a given total area and pixel density, but its possible to get one large (ideally curved) monitor that has the real estate of multiple lesser monitors. I found going going from twin 23” 16:9 monitors FHD monitors to a single curved 34” 3440x1440 monitor a reduction in distraction, as well as increase in real estate.

Multiple monitors are a distraction, IME, because of discontinuities (all of gaps between them, discontinuity in viewing angle, and, if they aren’t identical devices in pristine condition with identical settings, differences in display quality, whether its color/brightness/contrast/etc.)

It's funny how our brains work, eh? I find I'm the complete opposite. I need two monitors so things are right there in my face. I get distracted switching tabs. Thanks a lot ADHD.

My biggest pain point with big monitor tiling setups is nested/incompatible windowing/tiling management.

for example i often use Pop Shell, VSCode, tmux and firefox. So now I have many different layers of windows -

    Pop Shell 
      - Desktop/Monitor 1
        - Firefox
            - tab1
            - tab2
        - Terminal
            - tmux
                - pane1
                - pane2
        - VSCode
            - tab1
            - tab2
                - splitleft
                - splitright
      - Desktop/Monitor 2

All of these layers are different keybinds and windowing systems with no smooth integration. Pop Shell has one way of stacking windows into tabs, tmux has another, firefox has another. Ideally i want one set of keybinds that can seamlessly let me search for a firefox tab or an open editor tab, or move a tmux pane into a terminal window into a stacked pop shell window. Like one set of controls and UI for all the windowing. Currently i think we all are juggling multiple nested paradigms and sets of shortcuts for no good reason (besides it being hard to implement)

Does anyone have a nice solution for that?

The thing that you want was around in the 90s already, and it's called multiple windows without tabs.

Yes but unfortunately that doesn't really work for heavy applications today. That would mean like 50 independent memory-hungry firefox or IDE processes corresponding to every tab/file you might have open. The entire point is to decouple a window from the resources/host process that controls the window.

Why would an IDE have a separate process for another window? At least, Idea does it right (iirc).

As for FF, I have 47 windows opened, but 11 processes running—one of which is a ‘master’ process. Meanwhile tabs that are in one window can still run in multiple processes.

multiple browser windows are not different resource-wise than multiple tabs, you are still running against same instance of the browser.

The other benefit of leaving window (and tab) managerment to the OS is that tabs switching should also better, imagine your tabs show up in the OS switcher and you can look them up in spotlight or something.

Oh wow i guess i should really try this "window" thing then. I am dumb lol. Thank you for all the replies here.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-less/mdndkocia...

FF might have a setting on ‘about:config’ for whether to open links in tabs or windows. But off-hand I only know for certain about the one for links from other apps.

> I find switching applications with keyboard shortcuts and focusing on one thing at a time has improved my productivity. Using two or more monitors made it so easy for me to get distracted.

I very much agree with this - alt-tabbing between browser, terminal and fullscreened Emacs are what I've been doing for years. But very recently I decided to make two significant changes:

1. Adding a second monitor for documentation or visualizing output. When I'm going through longer written works (tutorials on languages, toolkits, etc), it's rotated to portrait mode and I find it more conducive to typing and testing things on the first monitor (with Emacs still fullscreen, but C-x 2 for splitting it in half). Recently I've been playing with OpenSCAD and I've liked having the second monitor in landscape mode; then I edit files in Emacs, and OpenSCAD updates the render as soon as I save the file. Transcribing music from scans displayed on a portrait monitor into MuseScore in fullscreen on a landscape monitor is a third "topic" I find two monitors handy for. Lastly is IT/sysadmin where I have a 160x60 terminal with a tab per server on the landscape monitor, and dashboards or documentation on the second monitor rotated to landscape mode. Control PgUp and PgDown between server consoles, each running screen, where screen zero is colorized log output.

2. The second change might have a a bigger impact than the first: multiple virtual desktops, one for each "topic." For example, my virtual desktops are currently entitled "Main", "IT", "3D Modelling", "Programming", and "Music". Of course I switch between them with a keyboard shortcut. This really seems to help my focus, by putting things "out of reach" so that I can't just Alt-tab to Reddit or HN when I'm bored or stuck.

The key with any tool is to figure out how to make it work for you, not against you. Sounds like you've already made progress on this front, but I thought I'd provide my two cents.

I use two monitors, but one is my tiny 13" laptop screen which has _only_ my browser on it (which holds my current project, and Slack et al. in various tabs)

Everything else lives on my 32" 4K monitor. This gets me a nice compromise, as I found having two larger monitors leading to distraction as well (or just completely ignoring one of the monitors, so it added little value to me).

fools begone.

The ideal monitor rotation --the one that secures the most favour on HN-- is a slow 1-2 centimetre per second continuous orbit about the office in 2 dimensions on a tracked rail. This in turn ensures that one may not only glorify their monitors rotation, but also glorify their practice of standing whilst working instead of sitting. The movement --which rotates as well amongst its own Z axis-- also promotes good evangelical proselytization of the many woes of desk sitting, for example, that ten million people die per second for not standing at the lectern as a fourteenth century pork belly clearinghouse clerk.

At days end then the monitor should be guided into a velvet sack, and stored gently atop a layer of old Haskell parchments that it may succor inspiration at the next stand-up which is conducted standing, as our christ lord intended.

one screen comms, one screen work, comes in at #2

Don't forget those us of old school guys. Everything should be displayed on paper. Changing fonts means physically changing the type. As everyone knows ed is the ultimate editor!

Now get off my lawn.

I'm upvoting this solely for the reason that I want more comments on HN similarly deliver aesthetic pleasure.

(Also let me guess, one of your favorite authors is called DFW.)

Now, you're going to need to stock up on these (https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electroni...) and start re-wiring your office.

Am I the only one (fullstack programmer + designer + hobby photographer) here who's perfectly okay with a single laptop monitor? Maybe it's to do with I love being mobile, maybe it's that I use UI and text very small, but I can perfectly fit either 3 Vscode tabs, or website + PIP video, a few terminals, many views in Sketch or a combination of those in a screen (16" MBP). I'm also okay with working with Photoshop or sometimes DaVinci Resolve or After Effects too.

Honestly I don't understand why so many screens are needed, haven't felt any need for more than one in 15+ years (though I've always used max possible resolution + very small UI scaling). I even don't use multiple desktops.

Not a rant or criticism in any way, just trying to see an actual need for multiple (or rotated) monitors.

I used to feel this way, and then I got old

And monitor aspect ratios got shitty.

Same. At one point I could easily read 4pt fonts. Now everything is a blur.

get glasses?

Glasses which focus at your computer distance (which varies by personal preference; measure it and take that number to your optometrist) help with presbyopia.

However, there are many other eye ailments which tend to appear later in life and which glasses alone cannot correct: cataracts, macular degeneration, corneal dystrophies, etc. Some are treatable through other means such as surgery.

The majority of people who lose visual accuity as they age don't get macular degeneration or cataracts during their working years, they just need reading glasses.

It's a bit like saying 'my head hurts' and someone says 'take some tylenol' and you say 'some people have flesh eating brain viruses or prion diseases'.

You're not technically wrong but those aren't the things that affect most people complaining about font size.

I agree with you that most people only need reading glasses — or more precisely computer glasses, which are typically set to focus at 20-24 inches rather than 16 inches as is common for reading glasses.

However, I think you are understating the problems posed by other conditions. The prevalence of cataracts by age 64 is in the neighborhood of 15-20%.

https://www.nei.nih.gov/learn-about-eye-health/outreach-camp...

It's a good bet there are some people reading this who have been treated for cataracts.

> you say 'some people have flesh eating brain viruses or prion diseases'.

Dismissive attitudes like this among the visually acute are one reason website accessibility is generally so poor.

> The prevalence of cataracts by age 64 is in the neighborhood of 15-20%.

But what is the lower bound where it starts to get that common, is the question? Does it affect people in their careers that often? probably not.

>Dismissive attitudes like this among the visually acute are one reason website accessibility is generally so poor.

Sorry you disliked my analogy but it has nothing to do with website accessibility, merely the way you structured your argument/post in reply to my reasonable response of 'get glasses' to jumping to macular degeneration.

> But what is the lower bound where it starts to get that common, is the question?

This data is available at the NIH link I posted earlier, which breaks things down into 5 year spans.

The lower bound is 10%, since that's the prevalence by age 59.

> Does it affect people in their careers that often? probably not.

The data makes this assertion obviously wrong. A huge number of people get cataracts during their working years.

Fortunately, surgery to treat cataracts has a 95% success rate. Unfortunately, it's not 100% (and anecdotally I know multiple individuals in the lucky 5% whose vision has not improved after cataract surgery.)

I have them, and have had them since I was maybe 4. They work up to a point. This is more along the lines of need bifocals.

Wearing glasses for 12 hours a day after never wearing them can be a difficult adjustment to make.

Wearing glasses for 12 hours a day after just wearing contacts most of the time for a few months can be jarring. I always forget how tiny it makes everything look!

an easier adjustment than not being able to see.

But it's not the only option. Another option is a bigger screen with bigger fonts. And that's a lot easier to adjust to than glasses. I know because I tried glasses first and then went to a bigger monitor.

In a sense, yes - but even after adjusting to glasses for 20+ years I still find it far more fatiguing than working without glasses.

I’ve tried all kinds of things but my eyes are bad at working through glasses.

With all due respect comments like this are why hacker news needs a downvote button.

Try a decent monitor setup before knocking it.

Hacker news has a downvote button, unlocked after a certain amount of karma, but it's not to be used simply because you disagree with someone.

what? why would this be worth a downvote? also, what is with this attitude that nobody who has tried a "decent monitor" would be fine with a laptop? i have 2 high end monitors on my desk at work and i rarely use them because i prefer being comfortable on my shitty laptop so that i can be as productive on the go as i am in the office (or at least not be crippled by wishing i had a "decent monitor setup")

Comments like this are why the Hacker News downvote button is restricted.

I did try it multiple times in the past, I actually have a 32" 4K collecting dust right here. I just ended up not using them, ever.

I didn't make a statement like "multiple monitors are useless", which would probably deserve a downvote.

I genuinely asked, with all the respect to everyone who prefers multiple monitors, why they needed them as I might really be missing something that I haven't realized yet.

Can you please describe such decent setup and your workflow with it? Anything I tried was too uncomfortable, and I noted that a combination of software, “desktop tools”, and actively used windows may play a big role in it. Pros and cons, tradeoffs and balances.

I just don’t find laptop monitors very ergonomic. I use a 27” 4K screen and put it so far away that 200% scaling is ideal, then have the desktop disable the laptop monitor when it’s plugged in. If I’d have the office space I’d use a 65” TV as a monitor and put it many meters away, that’s just my preference.

I can upgrade your claim: laptop monitors are not ergonomic, period.

Laptops force you to place your hands close to your monitor, which is really bad ergonomics - either you place the laptop low and kill your neck (looking down for long periods of time can cause spinal fusion and back problems in your 30's - careful with how you hold your cell phone:), or you place your laptop at head height and kill your wrists.

If you value your body at all, you'll keep your keyboard and display in their appropriate places and well separate from each other. Laptops should only be used in case of emergency, or while docked.

You can also put some books under the laptop and use it as a screen while connected to an external keyboard at desk height.

I have a nice monitor setup, but I am now ok on my MBP 16” alone, if necessary, when coding ever since I switched my coding font to Pragmata Pro for increased horizontal density so that I can do side-by-side with comfort.

It's possible to not know what you're missing until you try it.

I'm sure you're not the only one, but I find multiple monitors invaluable particularly for front-end work.

I might find myself rapidly switching between framework documentation, developer tools, a preview pane, and a similar piece of code that I'm using as a template. I'm infinitely happier when each switch is an eye movement and not a jarring keyboard stroke that redraws the entire screen.

I'm curious if you're unphased by constant cmd-tabbing.

It's unfazed but yeah I for one am. Or swiping on the trackpad. I've never liked fiddling around with window sizes and arrangements, it's easier to just drop everything on a full screen and flip around. I do the same on my 27". The only thing that's painful is when app developers still think drag-and-drop-only is good UX.

When doing web development, I usually need the webpage + browser console open on one screen, and IDE on the other. I don't see how you can test all resolutions while keeping your code on screen otherwise.

And when working on tricky pieces of software or technology I'm not so familiar with, I find it convenient to have the documentation on one screen, and the IDE on the other.

Of course, YMMV.

'Needed' is too strong a term. I function OK on a single screen laptop... But I've got a second screen in my laptop bag for when I'm going to be sedentary for several hours. I work in 6x10 font on my emacs at my main workstations, so I'm moderately small text. I stopped using 5x7 some years ago. But somewhere in there, you start using mental effort to resolve the smaller features.

The big reason I prefer more real estate is that it's desperately more mentally efficient to e.g. trace through multiple levels of abstraction with your eyes, than with eyes plus fingers plus reorient on the new desktop configuration.

Just having "the usual" fullscreen editor setup on one screen, and "the usual" browser or mail setup on the other is a huge improvement.

You’re not alone, I use the 4K monitor on my laptop exclusively and it works just fine. More space for me just means I keep to much stuff open anyway

"Needed" isn't the right word to use here, because you don't really need very much in software development.

Use a non-visual text editor without highlighting, like ed. Compile your React by hand. Skip TypeScript, you don't need the computer to check your work. /s

Programmers use tools and automation because it makes them more efficient, not because they're needed, and I believe that having multiple monitors (and larger ones? I'm reading [1] right now and it suggests that, which makes sense - if a larger fraction of your field of view is consumed by the same monitor, that's less effort for your brain to parse stuff you see, and fewer distractions; also see [2]) does that. I hypothesize, although I haven't been able to find empirical evidence, that having multiple windows spread across multiple monitors is cognitively superior to alt-tabbing between them.

Additionally, laptop are really bad for you ergonomically. Use a small screen if you must, but your back is not going to be happy after 5 years of programming on a laptop - I know mine isn't.

[1] https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA461180.pdf

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I totally agree with ergonomics and back. I try to stay active physically, stand and walk a lot, to compensate to some extent. So far so good for about 13 years on laptops, though I'm relatively young so maybe that's just my body tolerating the negative sides.

Though sometimes I put a box on the table and put the laptop on top, effectively turning into a standing desk a work a few hours like that. It really helps not to be sitting the whole day.

My 45 year old back is just fine after using only laptop displays for 9 years now. That said, I am pretty physically active and have led a healthy lifestyle since forever. Maybe the latter part is key.

it definitely helps a lot. i have horrible pain using a laptop for long periods, but when i was more active it really helped with the pain and soreness.

ed is the standard!

Didn't get the answer I was looking for when searching for 'ed'. Well, I found it after adding a word, but got a chuckle first.

I tried a huge "wraparound" dell screen and after 3 months I never got used to turning my head: I kept centering a window that was roughly 4:3 aspect ratio, just enough to fit 80 columns of text and a sidebar in VSCode/Sublime, or a typical browser session.

The biggest problem I had was switching between laptop screen and giant monitor. It sucked, I would constantly have to fix the desktop whenever I went to a conference room and returned to my desk.

I think if you work in exactly one desk, and simply need auxilliary screens that you don't look at frequently, big monitor or multi-monitor helps, but I don't know what situation would call for that when you can just swipe to a new desktop.

> Am I the only one

Nope. Pretty much anytime you ask yourself this question the answer is always no whatever the context. You are reacting to a single anecdote. People like lots of different things.

PWM Flickering would be one reason? On M1 Air there is pwm flickering which makes impossible to work with it ... thanks Apple. [0]

I would connect external monitor but it has flickering issues with them too. Thanks Apple again. [1]

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/PWM-Ranking-Notebooks-Smartpho...

[1] https://piunikaweb.com/2021/01/08/apple-investigating-mac-mi...

I’ve found turning the brightness up all the way to help with that immensely.

I've found it too but then the usage of it brings some limitations you know and basically makes it unusable as laptop.

> On M1 Air there is pwm flickering which makes impossible to work with it

According to table you linked M1 Air has PWM frequency of almost 120 kHz, which very high and well above headache and eye strain inducing frequencies.

According to my doctor and my eyes state since I've started using M1 air it doesn't matter which frequency was used by the idiot who decided that PWM is a good idea to regulate brightness of the monitor.

Also there is 60Hz flickering that doesn't go away with any brightness level.

I think it is especially bright idea to design a working monitor and then spoil it with PWM rendering it unusable. I personally consider it as a fraud and the essence of disrespecting people.

During my wfh phase of the pandemic, I used a laptop exclusively without major issue. The one problem that I had was working with large pdf engineering drawings and other page based layouts. In those cases switching virtual desktops didn’t come close to being able to glance back and forth between different applications. As a workaround for this, I found myself using a printer much more than in the office. Once I took the time to print the documents, having the traditional physical copy was sometimes better than a second monitor, as I was able to more easily markup and add comments on documents.

For strict programming this is less of an issue and I’ve found that I can keep the documentation in a split screen without issue. Most sites are responsive nowadays which really benefits having smaller windows.

> Am I the only one (fullstack programmer + designer + hobby photographer) here who's perfectly okay with a single laptop monitor?

A nice display is nice. I feel way more productive on a 27" 5K imac than a 16" MBP. But I find multiple monitors to be annoying, better to have just one that is good (e.g. a 5K 27" LG or an 8K 32" Dell that I won't be able to afford anytime soon).

After doing the exercise of going from 3 displays -> 11" MBA (no external), I'm maximally productive on any reasonably sized laptop monitor.

16" is great, but I'm probably 95% on my new 14". It's all about optimizing your workflow, utilizing workspaces, tiling, etc.

I mean, sure, you are probably going to be 80-90% on any monitor that doesn't hurt your eyes (crappy refresh rate) and can support bitmapped graphics (not just a TTY terminal display). But having lived through multiple iterations of displays starting from plain old TTYs (4 inches at that!), I really appreciate display advancements and getting access to better/bigger ones.

I'm 45 and have been programming professionally for 26 years - not some kid trying to be controversial. I feel there are distinct advantages to improving your workflow and working w/ a smaller and/or fewer displays. The main issue is scan time for your eyes and neck.

As well when you have a more focused presentation, you are more deliberate about your workflow. Do you need to see five columns of code simultaneously? I'd argue hardly ever, and trying to maintain that layout with what is optimal or useful is extra cognitive overhead or simply wasted space that is not helpful to being more productive.

Last time I was in an office about 3 years ago, they gave me a 34" widescreen. I only occasionally hooked it up where that width could be helpful, but most of the time I opted to use my 15" laptop display as I'm simply more effective in that mode.

Nope. I have actually found that the less monitor space I have the more efficient I am forced to be.

I work in vim and often have multiple tmux panes. Sometimes I can literally be writing code in a pane that’s only a handful of lines tall.

No, you're not alone. I tend to get lost in a screen as large as the 27" iMac I used for a few years. I usually ended up keeping my windows small and sticking them somewhere in the middle of the screen. For work (IT admin) I have a Surface Pro with a 10.5" screen docked to a 24" monitor at my desk, but I tend to only use the docked monitor for remote desktop or documentation. I often end up just ignoring the big screen and working right on the Surface's tiny screen.

At home (programming, hobby graphics/illustration)I use a 15" ThinkPad and have never felt the need to add another display. It's nice to have the option for some workflows but the reduction in mobility is a definite trade-off. (It's hard to use a second screen on the couch, etc.)

I had this problem when I first got a 30" monitor - I was constantly losing my mouse cursor, it took forever to move over to things, etc. To solve it I wrote a program for storing and restoring mouse cursor positions (along with focusing the app under it) and it really helped.

It was nice being able to have multiple windows visible at once when I was doing things, and to be able to switch between them quickly. Mobility was basically not a problem since the mouse instantly moved to the location I expected it to.

Nowadays I mostly use the keyboard and just use standard hotkeys to switch the app, mostly because I've been too lazy to see if my program still works.

I also lost the mouse cursor fairly often. I turned up the size and acceleration and got into the habit of throwing it into the top left corner which either opened the applications overlay (in GNOME shell) or fanned out all the windows (in Mac OS).

Nope, me too. I tried 2+ monitors and it is so distracting + you have to literally rotate your head, and then there is a window auto-positioning issue (mswin “helpfully” tries to show dialogs/etc on an empty screen). Extended mouse movement is also an issue.

I prefer to tile/overlap windows with fancy zones and to switch between apps by alt-tab. Virtual desktops may be helpful, but I’m really fine with just one desktop and many windows. Conemu builtin tiling helps with fullstack tracing. 2k or 4k, 27" with a 3d mount is ideal. The diagonal really depends on how close you are, and how much ppi it has (angular size/resolution).

I don’t understand 3+-monitor guys, it feels like hax0r overcompensating sort of.

Yep, I can relate to why you find it curious, I do too, from the other end of the spectrum.

I, for one, feel _very_ unproductive with a laptop. Personally for me I think the reason is lack of a mouse. For a long time people told me its because I was not using a MacBook (and hence its touchpad), but I tried that for ~5 years too and it didn't make much of a difference.

I guess at the end when I'm using a laptop it feels like I'm "converging" or "constraining" my body (eyes, hand coordination) into the laptop. In contrast, connecting to a dock with a full size keyboard, mouse and monitor (1) makes my body feel more stretched and relaxed. While doing this, I rarely use my laptop (I might even just close the lid, if I weren't lazy).

This is to the point where I will decline to work if I am not allowed to use a monitor+keyboard+mouse setup.

Agree. For me, I always preferred the ‘nub’ present on some laptop models over the trackpad (despite their sad tendency to wear and drift over time).

It's hard to conceive a working device that is less ergonomic than a laptop. They're really not made for human anatomy. From the screen that makes you crane your neck, to the staggered terrible keyboards.

While there are certainly posters here with people that have developed for 10 years without any issues, carpal tunnel is a lot more common than people think. It's very easy to cause irreparable damage to the body when using these devices that have about zero consideration for the human body.

With Mac OS 13 inch display was quite comfortable for me (MacBook Air 2011). After that I tried 15 inch ubuntu ThinkPad and it was a lot less comfortable even when I set up virtual workspaces and hot keys for switching between them.

For me MacBook touchpad gestures for managing virtual desktops/workspaces is what makes the difference.

For years I worked on a single 16" laptop screen, because I was constantly on the move. It was fine. Then the pandemic started and I was stuck at home, so I started using an external 27" monitor instead (single monitor) and then I picked up a second 32" monitor.

Now I use 9 desktops across two screens, and it's a lot better. I'm much more productive when I can see everything at once.

I suspect I'll readapt to a single screen as travel picks up again, but I really do enjoy my two big screens.

Not unlike my situation -- Loved working on a 13" laptop screen (with 4 virtual desktops to help with organizing), but a change in my duties at work had me working with 2-3 large spreadsheets at once, so I went to two large external monitors side-by-side and it's a god-send. I'd still prefer a small computer in my lap, but sometimes the job is easier with a different tool.

I'd lose a lot of productivity in without the external monitor. I can work without the extra, visible space, but I'll start losing things or having to bounce back and forth between virtual desktops/spaces/etc. A whole lot more. It just slows me down enough to be painful if I have to do anything beyond toy/trivial work.

I don’t think I could use my usual IDEs on a laptop screen for too long without going nuts. Even VS Code with its various unhidable UI elements is pushing it. For long term laptop usage I’d need to be writing code in something like Sublime Text or vim where extraneous UI is kept to a bare minimum.

And as others have noted, having a second screen for documentation and work chat (which can be the laptop display, don’t need a second 27”) is essential for me.

That's interesting, I use Vscode too, with 3 tabs perfectly fine, but maybe that boils down to style. For example I don't have documentation open (and if I get stuck I just Google/SO/GH) and Cmd+Tab'ing to switch to Slack easier than turning to a different screen.

It probably boils down to getting used to and muscle memory.

I'm another dev who works off a 15/16" laptop. I've always thought it was because all OSs make switching back and forth between more than two applications without losing mental focus, difficult. Instead I've added utils and cfgs to help with that in OSX.

>who's perfectly okay with a single laptop monitor?

I do feel awfully constrained on a laptop monitor. My perfect setup is a laptop and 32" 4k monitor. Email and chat live on my laptop, split screened, and my ide and terminal or web browser live on the big screen.

Honestly? Half of my problem is that window management sucks on os x, but IT doesn't feel comfortable with me running linux.

Amethyst helps with window management.

In the past, I could code using a 10px font size on a laptop. Now I'm only 30 and have to use 18px and 22px to be comfortable along with a pair of eyeglasses.

My current setup for optimal comfort and productivity is three large 4k monitors, one of them rotated.

Accessibility is also a reason for using multiple monitors.

Same, I do a lot of my work on a 13 inch macbook air ;p

Some tasks I like to be able to have more monitors, but that's becoming less and less.

> Honestly I don't understand why so many screens are needed, haven't felt any need for more than one in 15+ years (though I've always used max possible resolution + very small UI scaling). I even don't use multiple desktops.

I feel the same way, but I use the "medium large" scaling that macOS offers in Displays under Preferences. I do use multiple desktops, however, and using Cmd+Tab to switch between them.

If you are doing Front-End, 4 monitors can actually help (I use three, but have one split into two)

Monitor 1: The actual website I'm working on.

Monitor 2: IDE (editor)

Monitor 3/1: Terminal

Monitor 3/2: Documentation

Is that why so many websites suck on high resolution 4k screens? Because developers are looking at these websites on their tiny screens, lol makes so much sense

For me, depends on task and context. Working on my own code, distraction free, laptop in a library is heaven. Trying to troubleshoot stuff failing in prod right now, keeping multiple plates spinning, the more CPUs and screens the better.

Clearly there's a market for S-shaped monitors. You get the benefits of two landscape sections, two portrait sections, a central 45d section, and two small 45d sections, useful for putting notifications in.

Kidding aside, I just have 2 gaming monitors on either side of my MBP, in landscape. A screen for monitoring prod, a comms screen, and a code screen. When needed I slide out a coding window to another monitor.

I also use the extra desktops for my calendar and my task list. Three-fingers slide one way to see my calendar in maximized Safari, the other way to look at tasks in maximized Trello.

About vertical coding, I tend to think that if you need to go vertical to understand the code, it's already too long. Note I don't mean it must fit in landscape, I'm saying if it doesn't AND you need to see it in vertical for it to make sense, that's a smell. YMMV.

My setup in the office is a screen dedicated to Outlook, a screen for my code, and a screen for documentation and chat.

I know some people in the office who made one or both of the side screens vertical, but that doesn't work for me. Vertical means I'm tilting my head or my eyes up and down which doesn't feel great. Also horizontal side monitors are in my peripheral vision, vertical side monitors extend too far up to be in my peripheral vision.

I wouldn't want my center monitor to be vertical because then I couldn't easily put code side-by-side. I'd need to take over one of the side monitors which then would mean looking between them requires looking off-center and with a gap from the bezels.

I miss that.

When I was at work, I had a trio of old 20" (1680 x 1050, IIRC) screens. They were 2005FPW Dells that had a—for the time—beautiful IPS display. I got them used for around $80 apiece. Email on the left, documentation and browsing on the right, and code or database windows in the center.

Now in my home office it's a pair of 24" 1920x1200 displays. They're great, but I miss the centered "main" screen, and the larger sizes are wasted on the peripheries anyway.

I'm plotting my first ever switch to a tiling window manager (in my life!) to make use of my excessively large new screen.

I switched to an ultra wide for the same reason and haven’t looked back. With the right windowing software and Mac desktop, it is the best of both worlds depending on what I want (centered ide, centered terminal with multiple tabs, split browsers, split chat and email etc).

Give it a shot if you can!

I don't understand why 3:2 and 16:10 have taken over the mobile space but if I want one for my desktop my choices are 1920x1200 or a thirty inch, thousand dollar monstrosity with bad response times.

What's the thousand dollar monstrosity?

The only decent resolution taller monitor I'm aware of is the huawei mateview, which isn't available in the US

Perhaps the Dell 30" LCD UP3017A?

There are some 30 and 32 inch 2560x1600 monitors, such as from Dell, but they're mostly geared toward offices and artists and have terrible input latency and response times.

My sentiment exactly.

27" is a bit too tall vertically, but 26" or 25" would be ideal (with a resolution larger than 1920x1200).

If you’re in Europe, or are willing to attempt to import, the Huawei MateView is a brilliant 3:2 4K panel.

Why not something like the LG 27UK500-B on Amazon? 4K with 3:2 aspect ratio at ~$350

What do you mean 3:2? :)

aspect ratio

Everything I can find on the LG 27UK500-B says it's 16:9

https://www.google.com/search?q=LG+27UK500-B+aspect+ratio&oq...

God. I just looked that up. Looks sexy as fuck.

I can't see that Huawei gear is actually banned from import into the USA right now, though? Am I missing something?

Brilliant? As I recall it has light bleed issues and doesn't even let you adjust the color balance.

Bad response times plague the mobile space too. Just look at the new MBP with its 120hz display that has >40ms latency. But Mac displays, though looking gorgeous, have always had latency that was heavily perceptible.

Is there even a mainstream desktop display that has anywhere near the latency of Macs?

>40ms latency is insane if true. Got a source?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2021-M1-P...

The black to white latency is over 90ms, which is quite funny to me.

Macs have always been horrific for latency - I can always see the delay between me pressing a key and the letter appearing. But, I can also see iPhone OLED displays flick on and off due to their low frequency PWM, so this might be unusual pickiness from me.

You can always buy a inch+10% 4k 16:9 display and just set a 3:2, 16:10 or whatever resolution with cropping edges, e.g. 3456x2160 or 3240x2160 (check if your vcard can do that). It may be hard psychologically, but it’s so less expensive.

I tried that, but it makes fullscreen applications like games behave very oddly and inconsistently and required constant fiddling.

Not sure about "no longer worrying about that pesky 80 column limit"...

For once, I have an ultra wide monitor, and having 1-2 files of code, a terminal and a space for testing and research all next to each other is quite great.

Furthermore, I'm probably getting too old, but I find line length limits really helpful for readability: When you start to wrap those long lines, it kinda makes you think about introducing some temporary constants, extracting logic into a separate function, Not nesting conditions and loops too deeply... Maybe I'm just so very used to it, but I'm a fan, regardless of monitor size.

I feel exactly the same about the column limit (PEP 8 advocates for 79 chars). It forces me to organise my code better one line at a time, and I'm convinced it makes the reading faster.

Fully agree on column limit. I don’t have a hard limit set, but when I start to need to scroll horizontally on a file in a dual-pane 2560x1440 setup, it forces me to refactor things out into dedicated variables and functions, reduce nesting, reducing chaining, etc. On an ultrawide I think things would quickly get out of hand.

For years I ran triple monitors side by side. Then I tried dual widescreen monitors stacked vertically. This has been game changing. It is much easier on my neck to look up 10 deg vs turning sideways 45 deg

I can split VC code into three columns on my main monitor, then have two zones in the top monitor for other apps.

10/10.

Where does the webcam go?

I have two 27" monitors and got a webcam between them. It works well if you aren't bothered by the hard border between monitors.

I run 7 monitors. I've got a 2x3 grid of 24" monitors on a stand, and then a 27" widescreen standing tall beside it for code or a long terminal.

It's fantastic, though I could stand to have another row above. It's nice rarely having to switch windows - everything I need and use is right in front of me.

That's cool! Any chance you can post a pic of your desk? I'd love to see this

You'll have to excuse the mess :) https://imgur.com/a/5uTm7VB

Also obviously I hid all the proprietary stuff.

Those last two on the right look like they're basically behind you. How do you use those?

They are about 45 degrees to the right of center. I turn my head or swivel my chair.

woah thats bonkers! What do you do with all that real estate?

Pretty much the standard tools that most people have open all the time I guess. I just want to see them all all the time without having to constantly switch windows or hide the thing I'm working on.

Music, messenger, Discord, Slack, 2 or 3 instances of my IDE, source control UI, a terminal or three, documentation for the thing I'm working on, notepad++

Dude. If you get the third row PLEASE take another picture and share it.

Your set up is magnificent.

This is a beautiful desk setup. Do you prefer having the gaps in between?

No honestly I'd rather everything were flush, but that's the best I can do with the stand and monitors I have. The monitors aren't all the same make/model.

If anyone else enjoys pictures of these setups as much as I do, you may enjoy browsing this subreddit: https://reddpics.com/r/ultimatebattlestation

Neat website, unfortunate there is no sorting option or a way to port in your account's feed (I think?).

> Reddit isn't sharing their pics for this sub right now. Please try again in a couple of minutes.

My neck hurts just reading this

Fun! First encounter with a non-daytrader who's got more than my 6: I use 4 portrait on the desktop, and 2 landscape on a stand, held above them.

What window manager do you use? I'm Xmonad.

Windows :D

That's an interesting configuration! Also my first encounter with someone else who understands the value of screen space.

Do you also like to keep all your things out in the open rather than tucked away inside cupboards and drawers?

I have 6:

* 27” LCD x 4

* 1 iPad (maybe this is cheating a little)

* 1 Laptop

I’ve disabled the laptop though. The LCDs are in a 2x2 array all landscape. I use the iPad mostly for meetings.

I tried 2 and 3 monitors and then I realized I don't like moving my neck / chair.

I use i3 and now I have 10 monitors just in front of my eyes. I can easily switch windows, move an window to the front, side by side it's fantastic. Usually my applications have a default windows in which they open, switching to a specific application is muscle memory now. No mouse movement, no head movement. Just eyes and fingers coordination.

I usually have 8+ opened applications at the same time (editor, multiple terminals, mails, browser, chat) everything is in its right place.

Since my eyes can't look at two thing at the same time, no need to display everything. It's easier to press the shortcut to switch windows than to move my head.

Everything fits on my 3840x2400 13' laptop, it's like a Tardis, bigger on the inside.

I have 2 32" monitors (https://www.samsung.com/us/business/computing/monitors/uhd-a...) rotated 90 degrees (vertical). I became the "Oh, you're the guy with the two tall monitors!" guy at work. I like it because you can see so much code all at once. It is rare that the lines of code are so long that they go off the screen. I typically have the code full screen on the left monitor (well, I usually have a terminal window open at the bottom of the screen), the browser window filling the bottom half of the right monitor, and email/slack/etc. filling the top half of the right monitor. I've found this works best for me.

I do the same. My ideal monitor would actually be a big square, or something similar like 4:3. The setup works great together with an automatic window manager like dwm.

I went to check this link you've provided: (https://www.samsung.com/us/business/computing/monitors/uhd-a...)

Wow you press Specs and the site scrolls to the Specifications section which is empty. Such an example of respect from Samsung. Amazing ...

My ideal programming screen is a 1:1 square.

Before I got my 4K display I tried using a 24" 1920x1080 monitor in vertical orientation, and found that even though 1080 pixels wide should be enough to render any website fine, some websites (including some pretty big/important websites) started treating my screen as a mobile device screen, hiding many elements and giving me the mobile view/UI. I guess those sites weren't detecting user agent and were detecting screen resolution? Idk but it was annoying.

Got a 27" 4K screen last year and I have just left it in landscape mode...it's been fine.

> I guess those sites weren't detecting user agent and were detecting screen resolution?

CSS does this via media queries and allows for different layouts without sending different content. Switching to a mobile-optimized layout at 1080px (note "px" doesn't mean physical pixels to a mobile browser) seems a bit aggressive though.

I imagine it wouldn't be hard for a browser extension to override this behavior, though it could lead to broken layouts or horizontal scrolling.

Just zoom out. Make sure you use page zoom and not text zoom. No need for extensions.

Some 4k screens allow you to split the screen down the middle and act as two monitors. Maybe that'd be nice for you?

> My ideal programming screen is a 1:1 square

I have never tried it, but to me that seems ideal too. There seems to be close to zero demand for these, though, so I could only find this very expensive and not very high DPI monitor: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1138908-REG/eizo_ev27...

$1,429.00 for a 1920 x 1920 monitor? Meh. I'd rather stick with a single large landscape monitor.

Eizo makes a 1:1 26" 1920x1920 monitor. I've been tempted several times but the 1k price tag is keeping me off for now.

I've got one. 100% recommended. Bought mine at $1500. I'm not rich but I've never regretted this purchase.

Have you considered buying an nvidia card and 4k monitor of the same height (or width) and setting square resolution + cropping one/both edges?

No, I didn't think of that. It would give the same effect (after all 1920x1920 isn't that high a res). But on the other hand, could I resist using the other pixels I paid for?...tough choice.

I wish they made this with a high refresh rate. It would be hard for me to go from 144Hz panels back down to 60: https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.h...

Looks like they also offer a 2048px square 28" for anyone willing to pay Air Traffic Control prices: https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/atc/sq2825/index.html#ta...

Also this is the first time I've ever seen a monitor brochure page be NSFW https://eizo-or.com/en/global/products/monitors/

Those sites were checking the ratio of width to height of your screen instead of your window. If the height is taller they give you the mobile site. It's annoying. I've seen that before.

I fondly remember using two monitors with thin bezels one rotated 90° and the other 270°. I think they could be HP M22f. It makes almost a square. Bezels in the middle can be nuisance, but I usually divide windows or splits in the middle. I guess with as thin bezels as possible it should be still cheaper than the mentioned $1429 square monitor. Now I'm tempted to get them. But there are more pressing matters in terms of my setup though.

Why do people complain about wasted white space on the side of their windows? Who said you have to full-screen every application?

My slack window is about 1/3 of a screen, zoom a bit smaller, Firefox about 2/3 of a screen, Outlook about 2/3. I think the only window I regularly make full size is the terminal.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

> Websites and documents usually end up with a lot of whitespace and padding around them

I can't imagine have _any_ window full width on a large screen. I have 5 windows visible on my primary screen right now, and that's not even a lot for me. The browser, at max, is about 60% of the screen's width.

I'm not comfortable with tiny text. I'm using 27" display and with my IDE full screen I can fit around 140 characters. HN is with 250% zoom and around 80% of browser width right now.

Using those 14" displays is like using a phone, absolutely atrocious.

I think it's because Windows doesn't come with good window management. But now they have FancyZones[0] so it's much easier.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...

Graphical web browsers were originally made, like other graphical programs, for a screen with a resolution of (approximately, depending on hardware) 1200×900, where “maximizing” windows was not really a thing, since multi-tasking was what everyone did as a matter of course, with multiple programs open at the same time in their own window. Web sites were designed to fit in a comfortable window size of, again approximately, 600 pixels in width. Most PC’s were, at the same time, usually equipped with 640×480 screens, with only some PC’s having higher, so to see the whole web site on a PC you would naturally maximize the web browser program to the whole screen. Since multi-tasking was not really a feasible thing on PC’s back then (due to memory and CPU limitations), it made sense to give the whole screen to a single program, and PC windowing systems afforded this use.

However, when PC’s gained higher normal resolutions (800×600, then 1024×768, and higher) and multi-tasking became more realistic, this did not change the widespread user practice of full-screening programs on Windows! Instead, web site authors simply made web sites wider and wider. The users of large graphical displays did not initially complain, since their screens were wide enough to fit the ever-larger web sites, and these hardware platforms were falling out of use anyway.

And so we come to today, when we have more pixels than we know what to do with, and enough RAM and CPU to run umpteen programs at the same time, but web sites are still designed to be viewed in a maximized window, and users are still maximizing the web browser, and both web browsers and most operating systems are affording this use.

Extra points if your curved ultrawide is so wide that putting it in portrait has it curving above your head.

I fantasize about someone commercializing the deeply curved slot machine screens as general purpose monitors.

I have another idea, rotate it 90, then rotate the bottom near you. Now everything looks like Star Wars Intro screen.

I like portrait mode, but a modern monitor is too tall when in portrait mode. I just want a couple 4:3 screens so I can rotate one (or both) into 3:4 ratio.

Huawei sells a decent 4K 4:3 monitor. It’s a bit on the expensive side for the 28” size, but the form factor is quite good.

An alternative is sourcing 1200x1600 monitors on eBay.

The Huawei MateView is 3:2, not 4:3.

That’s kind of close enough.

I liked the square one from Eizo, but it seems nobody else did.

I just run on a 45" TV at 3840 x 2160. Sure, the response time is slow for gaming, but it works fine for movies and coding. And I have enough space that I can set each window to whatever size and orientation I want.

100% agreed.

Previously dual monitor, 24" 1920 x 1080, portrait left, landscape right. left was usually for email and chat, right for coding and browser.

Now it's a single 40" 4k tv as my display. Using gridmove to easily partition the screen as needed. It's like have 4 1080p screens with no border. Only downside I've come across is some screensharing apps will always share the entire desktop when sharing a single app (webex is worst offender) - just the app window will be shown, but with massive greyed out background. Can be fixed by changing desktop res, just an annoyance.

Moving to a single massive screen has honestly lead to better productivity, but i possibly attribute that more to gridmove than overall screen real estate.

I fix that by maximizing whatever app I'm sharing and upping the zoom. It looks comically large on my screen, but normal to the rest of the folks on the call.

For screen sharing I use Picture-in-Picture mode of my 43” 4K monitor (Acer DM431K) to give me a separate 1920x1080 screen to share when required. That way it is at the right size and resolution for everyone.

Interesting.. does this mean you have two separate cables connecting to two different inputs of the monitor?

Yes. One HDMI 2.0 to give me 4K@60Hz and then one usb-c to HDMI (or is it DP) for the PiP.

Only one input on this specific monitor can do 4K@60Hz, all the others are 4K@30Hz or good refresh at lower resolutions.

Takes 20 seconds to enable the second display in display settings and then pick the right input for the PiP mode on the monitor (it has a remote). Most of the time I have my personal laptop displaying in the PiP frame lower right. The remaining 3/4 of the screen is my work area.

I used a 40-or-so inch med-to-low tier TV for coding a bit, and was surprised at how not terrible it was. The latency was not actually that much worse than a monitor.

This was in the living room, which is sort of inconvenient. So I decided to get one for my desk. Being a silly project just for myself, I didn't want to splurge on it, so I went for the cheapest 4k I could find. I think it may have been a store brand.

The response time on that thing was noticeably terrible, like I would lose track of the cursor in vim because it wasn't keeping up properly.

The moral of the story I think is that you can get a not-terrible 4k tv for coding reasonably cheap, but the response time issue may still exist. It is probably just a roll of the dice.

I got myself the 49" Ultra-wide monitor from Dell [1] and it's a fantastic product. I was never really a fan of using two monitors so having two 27" monitors in one screen is really amazing and it becomes even better if you combine it with FanzyZones [2] to manage the window layout.

1) https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-ultrasharp-49-curv...

2) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzone...

I did the multi-monitor thing for years. Ultimately, I hate moving my head around that much. My current setup is a 4K curved screen, with i3wm. It's enough screen space for up to 9 usefully-sized panes, and also enough for a tall or very wide pane when the situation calls for it. The ability to reconfigure panes from the keyboard is a real game-changer.

I‘m unable to find the combination of „4K“ and „curved“ and „affordable“.

What model do you use?

I got a decently inexpensive 2k curved Phillips monitor at the beginning of the pandemic. Pretty happy with it (lucky buy, given that I didn't know it would be my window to the world for a couple years). At the time at least, 4k was still quite expensive. I don't know how much benefit 4k provides at typical desktop usage distances.

(328E9FJAB but I suspect you can find plenty that are just as good in the 2k range).

Well... I didn't say "affordable." I spent as much on this monitor as I spent on a laptop in grad school ($700ish). Three factors for me here: I transitioned to working from home and the expense was tax-deductable; I'm not in grad school anymore; I'm very frugal, so when do make a rare purchase, I go for quality.

Cool. Would you mind sharing the make and model, though?

Dell S3221QS

This is not an endorsement. I've got some issues with the monitor -- it does something weird displaying certain patterns, which comes up for me occasionally. Also, sometimes, the curved screen bugs me, because straight lines aren't straight. YMMV

It's quite decent, I use that when I work at the office, it can be bought for 550$cad if you wait for a sales.

When I work from home I use a Samsung 49" ultrawide (5120x1440p@120Hz). Moving the taskbar vertically on the left and using Windows FancyZone make that a wonderful and productive experience. My wife says that I appear to work for mission control at NASA with that setup; this make my inner nerd happy!

What is extremely annoying to me is that all these companies make ultra wide monitors without increasing the horizontal resolution. Why would anyone want an ultra-WIDE monitor with exactly the same resolution as a 4k monitor. The T E X T L O O K S S T R E T C H E D!

They need to increase the horizontal resolution when they increase the width of the monitor to add value over a regular shape monitor with the same resolution.

Are there any 32"+ ultrawide screens that have higher horizontal resolution?

I've never encountered an ultra wide that didn't support the equivalent desktop resolution. Are you sure this wasn't a problem with the drivers or the capabilities of the device you plugged it into?

No. Their max horizontal resolution (technical specification) is no better than a 4k monitor’s.

I've never seen this happen. If you look at Newegg for example all these monitors seem to have the proper resolution to accommodate their aspect ratio.

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ultrawide

*edited for grammar

Literally none of them have a horizontal resolution exceeding that of a non-wide 4k monitor.

I use a Samsung Odyssey G9 and it has both the distance and resolution of two 28” 1440p monitors. Thing is a dream for coding with but kind of terrible for both movies and games because of that crazy aspect ratio!

My Samsung Ultrawide has a 3840x1080 resolution. Once or twice it's been misdetected as normal horizontal resolution, when switching PIP off. I suspect you've been the victim of a driver/host issue.

Thats bad. That max horizontal resolution is no better than a 4k monitor’s.

My Dell ultrawide displays 5120x1440. It's glorious to behold.

What model?

I can only imagine this being the case if someone has their desktop resolution set wrong. The panels have square pixels, so increasing the horizontal size necessarily adds more pixels.

> 22 degrees

This angers me on a spiritual level. Where do your notifications spawn?

Notifications should spawn in /dev/null otherwise they interrupt flow.

They're there to make you work slower, perfect concentration breaker. Of course, if you're not busy they're fine as your attention may be needed, but they should definitely be off by default.

Since the advent of 16:10/16:12 monitors I've pretty much done the 3 monitor thing. One in landscape, and two in portrait. The two vertical ones get dedicated as an emacs monitor, and the second as a "docs" and status monitor. Usually running acrobat or a single browser window with an audio, or system status window pinned on top in an unobtrusive location. The single landscape monitor gets pretty much everything else, email, chat apps, xterms, etc, etc.

Once in a while, the docs monitor will get replaced with a giant log/debug window, but that is pretty rare.

So, I guess its a bit odd, but recently I started mapping the emacs and acroread with dedicated monitors to a hotkey so I can immediately switch back to them without the alt-tab cycling. So I have a really hard time understanding people with tiling window managers, or running on single screens. That might be the problem with the setup, because trying to use a laptop in a coffee shop is mostly impossible.

Sort of unrelated:

The picture of the monitor rotated 22 degrees contains a sticky note with what appears to be some sort of token/key/password.

it's base64-encoded "hunter2"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2 (They even base64ed it)

Why stop at rotation when you’ve got a full transformation matrix?

Ideal Monitor Skew for Programmers

25 years ago I worked on the air traffic control system modernization. We were using Sony CRTs that were square 2Kx2K with hardware anti-aliasing. The were drop dead gorgeous. I assumed that 25 years forward (today) that everyone would be able to buy such monitors below $1000 (they were like $10K in 1996 dollars).

Why no square monitors? Hollywood?

There is a square monitor from Eizo: https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/

That's pretty nice. Sold out from what I can see. Next: how to add that hardware anti-aliasing. I assume that GPUs can do that to your desktop.

Ah, that’s unfortunate. Well, the model is already almost 7 years old.

You could try to obtain the SQ2825 instead, but that’s not a consumer device and probably expensive: https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/atc/sq2825/

Interesting. I can buy a panel and diy kit for this monitor on AliExpress. Hmm.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32955608335.html

Nice find. If it was VA like the SQ2825 I’d buy it. (Just a personal preference, IPS glow bothers me and I want the higher contrast of VA panels.)

Three monitors with one central in landscape remains the best layout.

I have the opposite setup: three monitors but the central one is vertical. The central monitor is where the actual fucking happens. It only has a glorious 80x80 xterm with a large font.

I've found I like P-L-L

Leftmost monitor is portrait, the other 2 landscape.

Command line and documents on the portrait monitor. Editing/browsing in the centre. Mail and Teams on the rightmost landscape monitor, with browsing often moved there too.

My workflow is:

- text editor with two columns in the middle

- terminal with two colums on the right, left is git, right is build

- terminal on the left for connecting to production, investigating things, and manual testing

I also have a web browser (which contains chat and email) in the middle that I can swap to, but that means no coding.

I've heard that a lot of people like to have a browser to look at documentation at the same time as they code, but I haven't really found this useful, in large part because most of the code I work with has no documentation (the code itself is the documentation).

Only issue with portrait mode is that some monitors have bad vertical viewing angles so when they're in portrait it can be hard to see if you're off-center even by a little.

After reading this thread, things I [maybe] miss in desktop windows ui.

1. Different per-window dpi. Ctrl-scroll on a window title to zoom in/out at ~hw level. Apps shouldn’t care.

1a. Zoom in/out the entire desktop this way (ctrl-scroll on show desktop button).

2. OSX-like fit-size maximization instead of fullscreen.

2a. Alt-lbtn to move, alt-rbtn to resize, everywhere in a window.

3. Hotkey specific windows by alt-shift-digit, focus/raise by alt-digit.

4. Focus follows mouse, doesn’t raise.

4a. Make active windows fucking stand out again. And create a post-commit hook to autofire an idiot who tries to revert that.

5. Separate displays. I’d try have 2+ displays again if they were really separate and not continuous. Having a part of a window to stick out, misclicking into the edge, and windows popping up on a random display is just stupid. I want ~sort of~ two logins of the same user into one system. Switch by alt-esc.

6. Stick everything to everything and/or grid by 5mm to help my perfectionism.

> OSX-like fit-size maximization instead of fullscreen.

What I wouldn't give for apps to actually take advantage of this. Even most of Apple's own apps just treat the zoom button like an "expand window to size of desktop" button.

I'm curious what you mean by "OSX-like fit-size maximization". do you mean what happens when you double click on the title bar and the window fills the vertical space, but not necessarily the horizontal space?

Yes, this feature.

A lot of these you can build yourself with Hammerspoon if you're on OSX. Some quick comments since I've dabbled a lot in this:

#2a Better just to have a grid that you can resize/move to using keyboard shortcuts; it's too much of a hassle otherwise. On Windows there's already split-screen support for this with Windows key + arrows for instance.

#3 I've built this in Hammerspoon and it's a lot less useful than you think. It's better to have fixed shortcuts for apps that one doesn't have to consciously think about.

#5 I have app shortcuts that does some smart things with cursor placement to make it easier switching between apps. I find this helps a lot with this. Most of the time I'm not dragging the cursor between displays at all due to this. Also helps a lot to have a shortcut for "move current focused app to x display".

I've got 3, left is 90, center is 0 and right is -90. It's Tall,Wide,Tall layout. Works a treat.

Tall monitors must be hard on the neck if you frequently need to see the top half of it. The ergonomic recommendation is keeping the monitors at eye level.

How do you deal with that?

To expand on my sibling post, since vs code is really the only thing I run on the portrait monitor, I can scroll anything I need to focus on to the center. You’re right it’s tough if there is a blank page and you have to write at the top, but most of the time I’m dealing with a long enough file that I can move what I need to focus on to the center.

I see. I used a laptop with two external monitors at 0° and 90° for a while, but I ended going out of my way to avoid the top half of the 90° because it strained my neck too much. I tried to fill it with a dashboard, but then I was only using a monitor and a half for work. I've been happily living with a modest 0°, 0° since.

What I'd like: an editor with multiple tiled windows side by side, filling up a wide monitor, all showing the same text threaded through it. Line n at the bottom of one puts line n+1 at the top of the window to the right of it. Scrolling in one window scrolls them all.

(Of course you could optionally split it up differently to see multiple files.)

Like a newspaper?

This is exactly what I was thinking! Wonder how it works in practice.

You can do this in vim with the scrollbind option. You could create a simple script to set up the windows and get the views lined up to the correct line numbers. The one caveat is that enabling line wrapping will screw it up.

    :windo set nowrap
    :vsp
    ctrl-w ctrl-w ctrl-d ctrl-d
    :vsp
    ctrl-w ctrl-w ctrl-d ctrl-d
    :windo set scrollbind

Tried that but don't see a way to make the windows show different parts of the document. How does that happen?

And if I were to insert or delete lines in the first panel, would the others change their starting rows to account for that?

> What I'd like: an editor with multiple tiled windows side by side, filling up a wide monitor, all showing the same text threaded through it. Line n at the bottom of one puts line n+1 at the top of the window to the right of it. Scrolling in one window scrolls them all.

> (Of course you could optionally split it up differently to see multiple files.)

Now I want to go write some elisp . . .

But for the moment, I'll let you know that C-x 3 will keep splitting an emacs "frame" (window) in half vertically until you hit something like 10 columns. Just need to write the elisp for the rest of your feature request.

Hmm. That's a tempting little project actually.

The top of my tall monitor is level with the top of my landscape monitor.

So I look down to see the bottom of my tall monitor, straight ahead to see the top of either.

I also have one overhead monitor to glance up at for reference or other pages. 80% of my work is done on my main monitor. 15% on the tall. 5% on the overhead. The overhead is still very useful though.

I'm glad you have this setup.. I have resisted the urge to get an ultra wide monitor.

I really want to know how it would feel to have one narrow edge on the physical desk, with the long curve of the display arching up overhead.

I've found that to be generally true but there's one caveat, it only hurts your neck looking up from horizontal not from horizontal down. Think about how you read a book. You don't hold it directly out in front of you, you kind of prop it up on your lap. I could read for hours like that. Or look at a concert pianist. They'll either be looking at the sheet music directly in front of them or down at the keys. That's why I go with stacked monitors, one directly in front and the other angled between the first monitor and the keyboard.

My wide one is in vertical centered with the tall ones, so the talls are above and below. It's rad, I could have a nice tie-fighter image fill it (if I used image background)

I tried that but it’s a little too much head yaw for me. I landed with 2 monitors: 1 portrait to the left and one landscape to the right. This way I can comfortably see everything without turning my head. I keep vs code full screen on the portrait monitor and any terminals running on the landscape one.

I have a similar setup with a super ultra wide monitor in the center. Great for focusing on one document while having lots of reference documents, YouTube videos, and stack overflow pages on the other monitor.

I used to use the exact opposite. Wide, Tall, Wide.

Left was browser (with tree style tabs to the side), middle was Emacs, and right was everything else (mostly terminals).

Having a tall code editor was nice as it provides more context in a file. And with a maximum of 120 columns per line, width was not an issue.

But having Emacs on a wide monitor allows me to edit two files side to side, which I ended up preferring (one above another is not as nice). I just use two wide monitors now.

PLP. I had this for awhile (20-30-20) with the Dell U3011 back when that was a large monitor.

I have PL now with an ultra-wide but still think about trying to include a third monitor, I miss that setup.

Why do we limit ourselves to right angle boxes? Why don't we have "GUI blobs" floating around our screens? Hipsters would be thrilled.

I can't see that being practical. My setup for the last few years has been 2 ordinary monitors - one portrait and one landscape. I'll often read on the portrait and code on the landscape. It works for me. Give it a try.

One almost wonders if practicality wasn’t the objective of the exercise. Almost.

Truly a missed opportunity to demo Ski Free running on the last orientation.

With the only listed advantage being "longest line length" and disadvantage being "webcam starts sliding away", I'm shocked that you think a 22 degree rotation isn't practical.

I second this. A portrait monitor does wonders for coding (for me); My office setup consists of two portrait monitors plus my laptop screen in the middle and this works very well when multiple repos are open at the same time. I tend not to mess about with the windows displayed on the vertical monitors so I always know where to look if I need to change something (ie, backend on the left, frontend on the right). I've been planning to look into tiling window managers to see if I can optimize this further but it might be going a bit too far.

I use two moderately sized monitors, in portrait mode, as well as a larger monitor, in landscape between.

code - browse, etc - tail logs

lol

My contrarian take: I prefer to work from a small laptop, with a non-fullscreen terminal window, and no IDE. This forces me to understand the code I’m working on better - since I can’t see a lot of things at a glance, I got really good at juggling concepts in my working memory. I’ve read that visually challenged people who get really good at super fast text-to-speech almost acquire a super power of quick comprehension, and I guess I’m emulating something like that with my minimalistic setup.

https://xkcd.com/378/

> My contrarian take: I prefer to work from a small laptop, with a non-fullscreen terminal window, and no IDE.

Ah, the Joey Hess DE: https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/

Its ~23.2 deg for 21:9 ratio, not 22°. For a more common 16:9, the angle is 29°.

    (lambda w, h: math.acos(w / math.sqrt(w**2 + h**2)) * 180 / math.pi)(16, 9)

I noticed that as well and typed

    arcsin (3/sqrt(9+49))

into WolframAlpha.

It's clear in the picture that the corners of the monitor are not on the same level.

But now I'm wondering what led to the error…

What we need is short lines. Why? It's cognitively better. Fast reading apps optimize for eye movement.

Also this is why boustrophedon is great. It makes your eyes move smoothly, not abruptly skip left after each line. This is better for your attention and beneficial for your health by keeping you balanced.

You may notice the difference in how your sight/attention flow from left to right and in the opposite direction.

I've tried a lot of different setups over the years at work and at home, with laptops, 3 monitors, thin monitors, vertical monitors, etc.

I eventually settled on one 43 inch 4k monitor. I have it divided into 3 columns and 2 rows, and have everything I'm working on open at once so I don't have to tab between things, with the core work in center and the reference work either side.

As someone who's largely stuck with middle of the road hardware for financial reasons, i find that 1080p monitors are the sweet spot between having the screen estate for my programs and plenty of text on the screen, but also graphics performance if i ever want to do something else - from watching movies, doing 3D modelling or 3D printing, to gaming without resolution scaling.

Of course, i splurged a little bit on an RX 570, so currently i have multiple monitors connected to my PC, two stacked vertically, one on my PC case to the side, and another turned in portrait orientation to the other side. Personally, that setup works for me, since the way OSes do window snapping and tiling is inconsistent, so it's easy to work in both Windows and Linux with multiple monitors, without trying to split everything up into smaller zones or trying to use a tiling window manager.

However, if you want to customize things further (e.g. Windows doesn't really do vertically stacked snapping zones), the PowerToys FancyZones is suitable for this, whereas at least some Linux desktops can probably be customized to do this too (without spending too much time, i think LXDE didn't let you alter it that much, or another DE/WM, though my memory might fail me here).

There's something immensely useful about having one monitor for previewing the webpage or software that i'm working on, one for writing the code or using my Git client of choice, and another for anything from documentation, chat apps in the background or even just watching a video.

I'd say that the biggest problem with this setup is that i needed to make my own VESA mounts and a stand out of some PVC tubing and PLA plastic (3D printed and screwed on with bolts), since the options for any sort of custom monitor configuration out there are limited, if you don't want to spend a lot of money on it.

Your opinion of 1080p monitors is 100% tied to your GPU.

Apart from the reasons in the post above, there's also the fact that i wouldn't have enough space on my desk for multiple monitors at a much higher resolution, unless i were to use fewer of them - few large monitors at high resolutions (or just one) also work for some folks, of course.

The aforementioned window snapping issue would also take work with my current workflow.

And in regards to games and multitasking while playing them, having some titles take up the whole screen and not let me watch a video in the background would be annoying, too, unless i were to always play them in windowed mode.

Oh, and don't get me started on software, especially the kind that doesn't utilize native UI frameworks, not respecting high DPI configurations and everything therefore being unreadably small. On the other hand, resolution scaling in Windows sucks in certain software, e.g. i have a 27" monitor at work and scaling with a factor of 125% makes things blurry, which is really annoying.

So it's also a certain bit of modern OSes largely being defective and insufficient when dealing with certain configurations.

Would having a better GPU be nice? Sure. In this economy? Probably not. I also throttle my RX 570 to a 50% power limit, otherwise it tends to get loud sometimes.

I used 1080p for 5 years with a 33 inch screen, it was very good.

For 4 years I have used a 27-29 inch screen at 2k, that's incredible. I now use a 34" wide angle screen at 2k, which I find even better, since I have a bit more width without much (or any?) extra height.

At this exact moment I am on a 34" ultrawide and it's too wide for me I have to turn my head too much.

Bottom line, you can get 27" 2k screens for very cheap now and it's a step up from the 1080p, but yeah, the 1920x1080 is fine.

Head turning is actually why I have a vertical monitor. With a 1440p next to a 1080, I'd have to turn my head a ton to see it all. Now with my 1080p vertical less movement. It also nice that webpages like being above 1000 pixels wide, so splitting two web pages on the vertical keeps them in their desktop version.

I've owned almost every size and resolution of monitor to come out in the last few years (I don't know why, call it a hobby)

- Right now I've settled for the XDR. Less screen real estate, but text clarity is great, and no weird Dual DP issues like the 8k Ultrafine before it

- Second place is Dell's 40 inch "5k" ultrawide, the U4021QW. Good text clarity and plenty of vertical space (more than 34"/49" 21:9)

- 3rd place goes to two 4k 16:9 28" monitors on fully adjustable gas spring arms (I use gas spring arms for all my monitors, including the XDR)

- 4th place is a tie...

Either 38" 1600p ultrawides (gives you more vertical space the 1440p panels in 34" and 49" models) if you care about vertical space (ie. you wish we had 3:2 monitors)

or "5k" 34" ultrawides. Only two models were ever released with this panel, but you can still find them for sale new: PS341WU and 34WK95U

- 5th place is 34" and 49" 1440p ultrawides. These are the most popular ironically, but once you've used any of the above it's like going back to the 1366×768 days when it comes to looking at text all day.

Also curved monitors are a plague. Yes people get the impression that it's making it easier to use a wide screen, and it's a very intuitive conclusion to draw. But actually picture one of these monitors flattened out and you realize there's a minimal change in width.

If you're doing color sensitive work you probably don't want a curve due to the distortion, and if you're not then the slight color shift from a flat panel is not something you'll ever notice or care about, and in exchange for that you'll likely get much much better panel uniformity (curved monitors are much more prone to BLB due to the complex internal mounting setup).

I've been using a cheap SEIKI 4K TV for the past 6 years but recently moved my desk next to a window and the reflection on the glossy finish has made it hard to use. I'm looking for either a 32" 4K IPS monitor or a better TV to replace it but the options don't seem that great. Would love to get some recommendations on a good monitor or TV.

Right now I'm considering https://www.amazon.com/LG-32UN880-B-UltraFine-Compatibility-... but I just missed the deal that costco had on it ($500) so might wait to see the price drop again because it's been on sale for that price a few times this year.

I think I’ll mandate this for my entire engineering team, but put each team member 1 degree off from each other and measure the change in productivity. Not only can we see if the results are reproducible, but we can determine how much a degree of rotation impacts productivity.

Besides the straight-up superiority of the 22 degree angle, the monitor setup that works best varies greatly from one person to the next. It’s interesting how big the difference is. My favorite so far has been two 32” 4K IPS panels, flat!, plus a 15” laptop AND a tablet sidecar display occasionally. I appreciate the difference more clearly after I had a colleage who saw much of the same patterns in code and software architecture as I did – very similar end result of thought processes - but they were happy as a clam with just a 13” laptop and nothing else. It was so obvious that their mind just works differently from mine. My setup only served as a distraction to them and theirs to me.

As I've got older, I need fonts that are larger than what the gurus at Apple seem to desire. On a 5K iMac with a 27" U2720Q (4K) right hand side monitor, I have most web pages at 110%.

What I don't understand is why we've somehow got to the situation that a measure of font size has become resolution dependent.

I'm just physically measure an "M" on my web browser, and it's 4mm (0.16" or 12pt). The Mac insists on using somewhere between 8pt and 11pt. I can't expand that by the minor variation without losing lots of screen space.

I don't want a larger screen because the top of the screen is at eye level, which is the correct position ergonomically.

At the moment I have triple 24" 16:10 1920x1200 monitors in portrait with my laptop to the side on a mount.

I find this can be advantageous to my current monitoring/programming setup as I can split the 3 monitors horizontally into 6 "zones".

For the IDEs and what I am working on, this works great. But unfortunately monitor makers are no longer making 16:10 external displays. My dream display would be a 42" 6k 5760x3600 or 8k 7680x4800 (flat or slightly curved). As this would give ample real estate for full screen apps, the ability to work on IDEs that don't like multiple monitors, high pixel density for crisp text, and splitting into multiple zones.

Once VR headsets gain large FOV and high DPI, working in VR will be ideal and an improvement over any sort of monitor.

You can have 360+ degrees of scroll (beyond a full circle, you continue to wind into virtual space), spatial gestures to organize and manipulate your workspace.

It'll be like physical trades where workers knoll out their workspaces. We'll finally be able to do the same without clunky, insufficient windowing systems.

UI and 3D tools won't be limited to flat planes anymore, which will enable us to work with our hands.

I'm incredibly excited for this tech to land. I think it'll introduce an order of magnitude increase in productivity once it begins to mature.

I'm not so sure.

To work effectively and without friction, you want everything close at hand.

I think even the current rectangular workspaces that monitors provide are getting a little too big for this. As the workspace gets bigger, the organizational burden increases, as does the effort to navigate through it -- even if that effort is mostly non-physical.

I'm thinking we actually need better ways to focus, where the things we need for an extended activity -- and only those things -- are readily available in a simple workspace. I'm afraid a 3D VR/AR workspace will lead to me questing about, looking for that file or tool that is maybe 1440 degrees leftward.

> working in VR will be ideal and an improvement over any sort of monitor

For me, that's definitely not true. I have no interest in wearing a headset for more than a few minutes at a time. I also like that I can turn my head and look out the window at trees, clouds or birds or rain. It's how I think.

> I think it'll introduce an order of magnitude increase in productivity once it begins to mature.

I guess that's a good thing, but it's not terribly high on my list of things I want to work on to improve my life.

> spatial gestures to organize and manipulate your workspace

These are things that sounds cool on paper, but become impractical when you do them hundreds of times a day. For common tasks, users gravitate to the least amount of effort. It's why almost everyone knows `ctrl + s` instead of using the `file -> save` menu. Engineers in particular are prescient about their shortcuts (especially VIM users...)

Gestural interfaces will take off when they are the most efficient method for completing a task.

'Tis a bit of a silly article, I'd go insane trying to keep my application windows in the sweet spot for viewing them at a 22 degree rotation. One thing strikes me that I've wondered about when I would rotate some of my monitors: the color shift/viewing angle issue. I can understand in older monitors that have different viewing angles for horizontal and vertical, but some of my monitors over the years have been 176 degrees H + V or 178 degrees H + V, so why is there such a marked difference in what is being displayed when it is at 0 degrees rotation vs 90 degrees rotation?

At first I thought this is a satirical article but then I realised the author was serious.

I still think this ~22° rotation is utter nonsense.

I am pretty sure it is satirical, or at least not meant to be taken super seriously.

> It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80 column limit.

You don't need a monitor at a 22 degree angle to eliminate 80 character line limits ;)

Right now I use 2 4K 27" 120hz monitors from Acer (XV273K) and share both with a gaming PC and my Mac 16" laptop in clamshell mode. The Acers have a ton of inputs (2 DP, 2 hdmi) so it's easy to have all hooked up at once at the monitor end.

I also generally prefer one large monitor, so I will angle/connect 2nd DP to Mac, unangle/remove 2nd DP from Mac as needed for work. I am mainly a front-end web dev these days and occasionally really need that second screen! But I don't like moving my head around and inevitable go back to single monitor when possible.

Viva la flexibility!

This calls for a motorized solution!

Back in the day, my setup was one 30" in the middle in landscape and a pair of 21" (or whatever that was that had the right dimensions) on the sides in portrait mode. The big screen was the primary and the other two were for reference. I still think this is the best setup. Right now I have 2 large curved displays and probably double the visible pixels but it's not as productive.

For ergonomic reasons the rotation should change continuously and randomly so the developer doesn’t spend too much time in one position.

Keeps one alert and attentive too! The challenge probably also helps sharpen the mind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28794933

I posted this a while ago, I enjoy using a single monitor over multiple ones, multiple ones made sense when screen resolution was way worst.

I used to have multiple 4K monitors hooked up. No more. Ended up with single large 4K monitor in landscape mode. Portrait mode makes for way too much head moving. Unless on the move never use laptop screen. My laptops are closed and hooked up to the same large 4K monitors.

I use a 360 degrees rotation for my monitor. I found that it greatly improves my productivity.

For coding, document editing etc. a 5x1 portrait monitor wall is just about perfect (for me). It does make it harder to play games or watch movies but for a work machine that's kind of a plus.

I do want one of those big shiny new curved widescreens though.

My preference is an “H” shape setup using 3 2560x1440 monitors. Middle screen is landscape with a portrait screen on each side. Portrait is great for reading long code, slack, email threads. Landscape monitor is used for everything else.

Now, I don't like to judge the moral character of display positioning, but after carefully considering the .png of the preferred solution of this article's author, I am forced to question the nature of my reality.

Excellent work. :)

Absolutely entertaining post. I loved it.

Haha the sticky notes and photos. Quality entertainment.

Not sure why, when every flagship phone has rounded corners, we don't all use circular monitors. It completely solves the rotation issue, and is stylish too.

I feel like any linter would complain about line length before you needed to worry about line length on the monitor lol..but hey if it works for you!

Get a single 43” 4K monitor.

Then use a window manager that allows to automatically arrange windows. I build my own using Hammerspoon on macOS.

Great productivity upgrade.

If your desk is on a slight slope fix your desk. LOL

I bet Objective-C developers would love the long lines of using it set to 22 degrees, though :)

Why not just use two regular monitors then?

The ideal rotation is clearly π/8 rad

22 degrees? celcius?

Currently im trucking 4 monitors. I am planning to buy a 43" 4k tv and drop down.

Anyone else try this? Does it work out?

I did a 55" 8k for a bit but that was too physically big so looking at the edges was weird. 43" is probably a lot better in that regard but for me that turned me off single large displays instead of arrays.

In the end I ended up with 6 displays in a 3x2 arrangement: 3x 1440p + 1x 4k on the primary PC and 1x 1440p + 1x 4k on the secondary PC and then I used Input Director so it feels like all 6 are one big computer when using the keyboard/mouse (used to use Mouse Without Borders but Input Director is far superior these days). I like this setup more because it gives me a larger primary monitor on each computer to work off of but leaves me separate monitors to put secondary things on. This comes with the bonus that fullscreen doesn't mean "and everything else must be gone" yet I still have the bigger primary display to fullscreen with.

General note I've fallen in love with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082845XM8/ as it's simple, cheap, and extremely sturdy.

2560x1080 curved horizontal with editor between two vertical 1080x1920, one with terminal, one with browser.

This is completely repulsive. I love it.

After quick searching, seems like screen arbitrary rotation and positioning can't be done in macOS.

My ideal is one in front of me, and one rotated vertically to the left.

Vertical one is for chat, terminal, and or browser

Add a vertical on the other side and achieve enlightenment.

Thinking about a monitor with a 1024:1 aspect ratio which only displays a single long line of text

I don't think anyone posting here has actually read the linked article to the end.

I usually work from a Dutch angle because some code really has me cocking my head.

Is that a password written on the Purple postit that's glued to the monitor?

22 degrees, also known as the rotation of kings. Because it's majestic.

> Longest line length!

> like a thousand fucking characters

can't wait to enjoy this on my 14" screen

> pesky 80 column limit

that pesky limit is there to protect my sanity against shitcoders (which some are forced to be in shit languages)

so, please no

what's with the downvote, did I just harass a shitcoder?

Best suited for angular developers.

what might "aHVudGVyMgo" written on the post-it stand for?

Seriously?

Horrific.

No xkcd link?

https://xkcd.com/2119/

This is wrong. Best is 2 smaller monitors one at 90.

Everyone knows this.

Absolutely absurd. Just get a monitor that doesn't have a hostile, stupid aspect ratio. Then rotate it 90° if that's what works best for you. Done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com