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Comment by awolf | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of comments here from people acting as if not having two 24" monitors and a full mechanical keyboard would drastically diminish their productivity. This year I spent 4 months out of the country with only my 15" laptop while still working 8 hour days. I was surprised to find no change at all in how long it took to get shit done. I think we tend to kid ourselves about how much of a difference expensive equipment makes.

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I think it depends on numerous factors. For instance, I have spent so much time at a Kinesis keyboard that a laptop keyboard slows me down. Not by orders of magnitude, but enough to be annoying.

I used to exclusively work at two 24" monitors. Then I switched to a tiling WM and from many years on OS X back to Fedora. I found that the WM/OS switch improved my productivity to the point that I was better off on a 15" laptop with those two changes than before them on two monitors. And the setup was around $2,000 cheaper.

Now my ideal setup is a single large monitor along with familiar peripherals (Kinesis, trackball), xmonad, and Linux. If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be happier with one monitor than two--or nearly as happy on a laptop as a desktop--I'd have said you were nuts. But, here we are.

I agree that the difference in productivity between the worst-case (Mac laptop) and best-case (Large monitor; peripherals; xmonad) is not orders of magnitude. But I would say that over time it has come to approach 2x, which is not at all insignificant.

And I think "expense" matters little compared to "comfort". If a keyboard that didn't cost $250 was just as comfortable for me, I'd buy it. In the case of this particular switch (laptop -> linode), the comfort level would be close for most tasks as I already live in Vim and things with Vim-like bindings. But the totally new window/peripheral interface would definitely slow me down. I've spent enough years comparing environments over long periods of time to know that.

Yes, this is something I wanted to say and somehow didn't: one personal take-away from the experience for me has been that programming, ultimately, is thinking.

All the technology in the world doesn't make me think faster. The most I can ask from it is that it gets out of my way and lets me search, explore and express myself efficiently.

Exactly. A subtle change to our workflows where we force ourselves to think about the problem for a minimum of ten minutes prior to coding will provide more benefit than any piece of equipment ever could.

Not as sexy as a new cinema display though.

> programming, ultimately, is thinking.

I very rarely feel slowed down by my environment. It's possible for it to happen, but most of my time is spent thinking about a problem, not typing.

I think a lot depends upon what you're doing.

Most of my coding is done in an ssh terminal using screen/vim. For this task I find myself most productive in a laptop. If you can get used to a laptop's touchpad you can be very productive because I find the time to switch between touchpad/keyboard is much less than the time to switch between a standard mouse/keyboard. The small movement of the touchpad isn't a big deal because the viewing space is small enough.

When using a full blown IDE I find myself most productive on a large, high resolution monitor, mainly because of all the surrounding stuff IDEs add - small displays just can't display enough code for me. However, touchpads are no longer efficient because it takes too many swipes to move across the screen, so I have to use a standard mouse+keyboard, losing some efficiency.

Usually, I find myself wearing two hats - monitoring production systems while coding. Multiple monitors are invaluable here, allowing you to delegate monitoring to 1 or 2 screens fulltime, while you use the other for coding. This way you don't have to mess with alt tabs, you can just take a quick glance when you want to.

One thing I've found invaluable with a multiple monitor setup (I'm currently at 4, laptop not included) is being able to move from monitor to monitor quickly. I use global hotkeys for this - ctrl-1 moves my mouse to the first monitor, ctrl-2 moves my mouse to the second, and so on. Without this I found myself spending far too much time moving my mouse around the screen to truly find them useful.

I don't know - I find that smaller screens tends to mean more context switching. I often need to move back and forth between more terminal windows / virtual desktop / screen sessions where I'd just split my emacs session horizontally and/or vertically when I'm on a larger screen. The latter makes direct comparisons, cut and paste and working on things that cross files easier (e.g. writing a test and filling in code that correspond to them side by side)

I'm not sure how much a small screen would or wouldn't actually slow me down, but it feels more tiresome to work on a smaller screen.

That really depends on what you are doing. I can scripts as efficiently on a laptop. Larger projects get tougher as I normally want to see a library/another source file on another screen.

Systems debugging is where you really want the space. I often have 4 terminal windows open at once - you need screen real estate for that.

I think that most people aren't saying that they need the two monitors, laser mouse, etc. It is more of an issue of what helps them work the best. I spend most of my day using vim in a screen session on a remote server as well, but if I switched to this setup I think I would feel cramped. Sometimes I open four terminal windows at a time and have firefox behind them in order to get something done. Sure, I could accomplish the same thing with the iPad, but it would feel like a lot more work. Resistance has a tendency to suck away productivity.

Yeah I been working on a laptop on a dining room table for the last week. I think I get more done, it has been so uncomfortable that I do only what is necessary, no reddit or HN breaks to slow me down.

For the past 10 months, I have only used a 15" MacBook Pro, and I've been wonderfully productive. Before that, I did most of my dissertation (coding and writing) on a 13" MacBook Pro.

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