Hacker News Reader

Comment by djbusby | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com