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Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Its funny. I have programmed for a decade and at no point I have ever found that an external monitor was the solution to my problems. My coworkers think I'm crazy, but I do all development on a 15' macbook. My path to efficiency and ergonomic work has always been to become more familiar with the keyboard shortcuts for navigating windows and tabs. Along with Spectacle, Vimium, and tree-style tabs, I have never wanted for a second monitor. Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

My overall mantra at work is that I can only do one thing a a time if I want to do it well. I feel in a sense limiting myself to one viewport helps reinforce this behavior.

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I've used 13" laptops (MacBook Air, Chromebook) for years. I even use my 11.9" iPad when traveling. I mostly use a terminal app ssh'd to a remote server, screen and vim, and switch to a browser window. I prefer to keep my focus on one task in one full-screen window. I find that works best to keep my attention on one thing. Multiple windows, to say nothing of multiple monitors, just create distractions. For me programming and system admin mostly happen in my head, not in a multitude of windows and panes on the screen.

Back in 2005-2008 I worked at a software company that gave developers two large monitors by default, and some people had three -- a status thing for the more senior people. I noticed many of the second displays had Facebook or Twitter on them all day. I don't use social media. I only used one monitor at that job and when I started freelancing I used a laptop and that's worked fine ever since.

I'm old and have worked with screens and keyboards for 40 years, starting with dumb terminals, and never experienced any posture or RSI problems. I know some people do, and they tell me how unhealthy my setup is (no laptop stand or external keyboard). "Ergonomics" is probably more of a personal thing than a hard science.

No, you're just the equivalent of someone who has smoked a pack a day their entire life but doesn't have cancer insisting that that lung cancer business is overblown and unscientific. Even a high risk isn't a guarantee.

I'm not sure what you refer to. What risk do I face using a laptop?

If you mean my statement about ergonomics, look into it yourself, you will find mostly pseudo-science and unsupported claims, and an industry of experts and products that makes a lot of money. If it works for you, great.

External monitor does not necessarily mean multi monitor. I have an external monitor that is big, and has good contrast and refresh rate, but I close the laptop's lid.

Multiple monitors are ergonomically worse than multiple virtual workspaces IMHO - if you can set up keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse gestures.

For a while I used a single HD 32inch monitor and loved it. I avoided complex windows all over the place. But could lean back in my chair and see everything from a distance.

I am 100% aboard the single screen, single fullscreen app, almost exclusively keyboard work with lots of x-tabbing.

I really like having a second screen though. I keep my laptop open on the side and use it to display "read only" stuff like a build status, consoles, etc.

A second screen is a nice asset in a work from home with lots of video calls with screen sharing. I like having a screen where I can do things in the background while following what is presented in the call. When I present I like choosing a separate screen where I'll move windows in and out depending on what I want to show. People in my call don't have to see my other windows/notifications/mails/whatever when I switch from one app window to another. And it is way easier to have a dedicated screen than switching (or forgetting to switxh) the shared window.

For screensharing it gives a certain peace of my mind having the call in the peripheral vision. But it's still worse to turn your head than switching workspaces.

This is a bit of an odd take. Do you think that because you can manage one screen well that you don't need a second screen? Or do you think other people only need a second screen because they can't manage a single one?

More screen real-estate is just that. Effective management of two monitors might be a little extra work but it's worth it.

> My path to efficiency and ergonomic work has always been to become more familiar with the keyboard shortcuts for navigating windows and tabs.

> Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

Do you think you could have put this effort into coming up with a workflow that took advantage of multiple monitors? I didn't use multiple monitors for years, but eventually I tried it out and now it would be hard for me to go back, so I've always considered it to have a small learning curve to figure out how to "make use" of the extra space properly. I feel like being willing to use more keyboard shortcuts for windows and tabs would be an excellent way to get more efficient use out of extra screen space.

That's so interesting. I'm the opposite, but I've worked with plenty of people who work like you do. Both styles are pretty common.

    My overall mantra at work is that I can 
    only do one thing a a time if I want to do it well

I'm curious. What about tasks that are "one thing" but may involve >1 windows/apps? For example, referring to documentation while looking at code? Or tweaking CSS/markup while observing the resulting changes in the browser? (If you do that sort of work)

Yeah, I've had 3 monitors forever, and for a while I tried 4 [1].

I do webinars where obviously one monitor is displayed. I find it clumsy - switching between the code, the program, log, browser, docs and so on.

In general work I focus on one task, but I find that many programs are involved at one time. Docs on one, code on another, program on a third and so on.

I also have a need for email to be open, along with Skype etc. Those get hidden often though, hence my need for the 4th.

[1] my experiment with 4 failed because the horizontal spread was too far, and it was tiresome to swivel to the 4th.i considered putting the 4th above the 3, but felt that too might be "out of eyeline". So for now I'm maxed on 3.

I had three for a while but at some point the clutter and complexity overwhelmed the productivity

   i considered putting the 4th above the 3

"Out of eyeline" monitors can work for me, but only if they're for things I look at very infrequently. Like for example my music player.

Don’t you find looking down at a laptop painful after a while? At a desk I’m okay working on a smaller screen but if I don’t have an external monitor I need to raise it on a few books and use a separate keyboard if I’m going to spend 8 hours a day sitting like that.

I would consider it crazy to not have an external monitor. I always use one.

But that's not because I think it's important to have two monitors. I only use the external monitor; the laptop's built-in screen would only see any use while traveling.

I'm pretty sure that those people use professional laptop stands which elevate the laptop monitor to ergonomic height in conjunction with an external keyboard

No, I do not. I just put my 13 inch laptop on the desk. So far I have never felt any neck or back pain. I am 38 if that matters.

Nope, not at all. It may or may not be bad for my health in the long run but I feel zero pain from it while working.

But 'ergonomic work' has a lot to do with posture as dictated by screen positioning, not just size. With OP's setup, the 180 degree thinkpad hinge and external keyboard allow him to sit with relatively good form. I used to have a hotdesking setup that similar [0].

How do you do that with a MacBook, where the screen only bends so far? Do you also use an external keyboard?

[0]: http://i.imgur.com/3R51QXE.jpg

I do use an external keyboard and mouse with a laptop stand when I am at my desk. When I am out I just type on the laptop stand

Me too, I just use my macbook. I keep 2 buffers side by side in VSCode, and cmd-tab or cmd-` to switch to other apps/windows.

I genuinely suffer from imposter syndrome when I see my colleagues with several huge screens in all sorts of configurations. I guess I'm not a real hacker.

I can only look at one screen at a time anyway, so it's as fast to switch apps than to turn my head to look at a different screen. Plus if I want to move the cursor, I need to switch app anyway (or do a long trip with the mouse and click somewhere for focus which is even worse).

If anything, not spending the time to move your neck but rather manipulate keys to manifest buffers in front of your eyes is the real hallmark of being a hacker.

But only then when moving your eyes is slower than switching between your buffers. Explicitly on Mac, from what most people with just one screen talk there are nice fading-animations that cost at least 500ms.

There's a great MacOS app (AltTab) that replicates Windows' alt+tab window switching. It's fantastic, I highly recommend if you are as a big keyboard window switcher as you sound.

I just found contexts and it's fantastic, it's just like alt tab but also comes with a spotlight esq quick switcher and supports vim jk by default. It's also really useful for switching between desktops by turning "reduce motion" on.

https://contexts.co/

I started using Apptivate a couple of months ago, someone on here recommended it. It makes app switching very pleasingly fast. I use a PC kbd with a mac mini :-) and have F5-F9 assigned to instantly switch to the 5 apps I always have open.

Also, holding down F5-F9 shows those windows as long as they're held down. So now, to take a peek at the bash window I hold down F5 as long as I need to look. Can also type or drag things onto there while holding F5 with the other hand.

You can assign any app to any key or combination of keys. It's free. It can do other stuff too. Very highly recommended.

Also, F1-F3 I have assigned in the system settings to F1=Show desktop, F2=current app windows, F3=show all open windows (mission control). So I very rarely have to use Cmd-Tab any more!

http://www.apptivateapp.com/

I get it that you work on one thing at a time and you use programs with keyboard shortcuts like spectacle and vimium etc. But, still I can't help but wonder how does your IDE look? I am guessing you have a code editor (generally with a left/right/bottom panes with file explorer, repl, terminal, other tools etc), add a browser with a documentation page open and your real estate is too little and involves a lot of switching / scrolling, very easily due to all the keyboard shortcuts but its switching/scrolling none the less. Maybe you detach all these into their own windows and use different workspaces in your tiling manager, but that's again a lot of switching to even use a repl.

I am happy that your setup works for you, but a bigger monitor and/or maybe even one extra monitor will just help reduce a lot of that switching/scrolling.

Not your parent. But I do the same.

My IDE has basically just the code editor yes. I don't need the project Explorer. Zero useful information at most times so why open it? It's not often I need to know where something is. I open files by name via shortcut. Yes our naming is that good.

I don't need a browser with documentation open at all times. I only need to look at it IFF I need to look something up and if so I switch to it and it's full screen. Copy what I need. Done. No need to flip my head over to the place on some huge screen where "documentation lives". Also I almost never need docs as I have auto complete in the IDE.

When I debug half the screen has the debugger open but only when I debug.

I also know how to get to the place I need to with shortcuts at all times. When I see people use this weird "show all windows in small at the same times" feature used by people I die a little inside. Of course it's gonna take them ages to then find the right one. I alt/cmd double tab to the right window faster than the animation to show the windows would be done. I know that my documentation is two alt tabs away and with one alt/cmd tab I'm back in my IDE. I know the terminal is one alt/cmd tab away. I don't understand people that use small terminal windows integrated into an IDE. Small and unusable. I have a terminal window alt/cmd tab-able to at all times and I know which tab inside that window is for what kind of work e.g. logs tailed on tab 2. When I have it open I can 100 focus on it. No distractions.

As a human you can only focus your eyes at one single thing at a time.

Whether you have to move your head/eyes or press a key to switch between the documentation and the IDE does not make much difference in term of efficiency.

I actually find it more comfortable, ergonomic and fast to have a single screen and switch the workspace. That also means that my (physical) setup is minimal and easy to manage, and that I do not get unnecessary distractions or things moving (notifications, messages, ads, animations...) in my peripheral vision.

Where did you find a laptop with a fifteen foot screen?

Frank got it when he sold his 2000 inch TV.

not to mention being able to rotate it which portrait feels better with code and nice as a secondary dedicated.

It's on the macbook flair, which is a foldable cell phone with a keyboard. Developers have learned about the power and low cost for this machine and have started to use it as a laptop.

The multiple folds of the screen and keyboard are what allow the flair's 15 foot footprint to be carried around in a phone's form factor.

I have one of the original 16 core versions of these. Come to find out, Apple has recently released 80 and 128 core versions of the flair, so I may need to upgrade next year for the additional horsepower to run data models.

At least it wasn't in any danger of being crushed by a dwarf.

When you know it, shut up and take my money.

Nigel Tufnel must have placed the order

I use shortcuts extensively too. And sometimes work exclusively on my laptop.

That said, it's helpful to be able to use my project while seeing all the logs involved. And that gets extremely claustrophobic on a laptop. Especially if you have an application that is heavy on both the client and server side - chrome, chrome devtools, re-frame-10x sidebar debugger, server side logs/debugger.

It gets even worse when I'm working on one project, which is a client/server game using Unity.

> Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

Your applications should always be in the same place. You can still use keyboard shortcuts too.

Beyond that, because when I first got a 30" monitor it was so much real estate and it took so long to move my mouse between windows, I wrote a little program that let me set and restore mouse positions with global hotkeys. It will also bring whichever window is under the mouse position to the front.

So I can see all logs at once as I'm interacting with the project. Including the debugger. Everything always goes in the same spot. And if I want to interact with one of those windows, I can use a hotkey which will instantly set my mouse cursor to a known good position within that window, which enables me to interact with even a GUI in a reproducible fashion rather than having to slow boat my cursor over to it.

> Beyond that, because when I first got a 30" monitor it was so much real estate and it took so long to move my mouse between windows, I wrote a little program that let me set and restore mouse positions with global hotkeys. It will also bring whichever window is under the mouse position to the front.

On Windows, the focus-follows-mouse feature does both these things. Along with raising and focusing whatever you mouseover, it also moves the mouse to any window you alt-tab too. Sadly, it's been tuned weirdly in new versions of windows so it isn't very useful now.

That's cool, I didn't know such a thing existed - when I ran into the problem I was at a loss on what to search for to make the large monitor more usable.

Too bad it's weird now.

I don't use windows anymore, but when I first did this it was for windows, and it was only something like 100 lines of C to accomplish including all the standard windows boilerplate.

I don’t mind coding on a 12 or so inch laptop screen. But editing a LaTeX file is kind of a pain, because it is nice to have the code and the document side by side, but half a screen is quite small. I guess people working on websites must have similar issues?

Personally I don't mind seeing only the LaTeX code and looking at the pdf once in a while after compiling. But a second screen to keep open and accessible background papers or notes would be very convenient

I’ve been looking for an eink screen for exactly this kind of thing.

Unfortunately they only seem get be put in expensive tablets, or monitors that sort of want to be a main monitor replacement (expensive).

There’s an eInk panel that seems sort of niche-popular, 7.5 inch with 5s refresh, reasonably priced (used in some waveshare projects) but it seems that you can only get the bare board unfortunately.

But all the navigating by keyboard shortcuts in the world can't replace side by side behavior of two or three documents.

I mostly agree. I enjoy my 40” 4k monitors, but I’ve found that sometimes constraining myself to a laptop display can improve my focus. However, laptop keyboards, even those on macs and thinkpads, are poorly suited for extended use I think. The author is using an external keyboard, and that makes the setup much more usable in my opinion.

Where did you find a MacBook with a 15 foot screen???? No wonder you don't need a second monitor, good grief

I'm using 4 monitors, two 33" and two vertical 22".

It has nothing to do with knowing how to do shortcuts, but having to do them at all. There are plenty of instances where you may only need to provide input to one window at a time, but see other things, like documentation, output, logs, or a browser window of the page you are editing. Having multiple monitors allows me to greatly reduce the need to switch between windows to reference something or see results of my inputs.

I personally find that if I'm forced to alt-tab between my IDE and documentation, like when I'm working on a laptop, it's incredibly distracting, breaks my flow, and slows down my work significantly.

Wait until your eyesight starts to go, that 15” monitor won’t cut it!

I only use one monitor and use virtual desktops and side-to-side windows for context switching. But it's the external monitor if it's available, it is more ergonomic to work on a big screen, at the optimal distance and height from the eyes, and with the neck and spine properly aligned rather than curving down.

I use only 50% of my MacBook screen for actually writing code, and in fact I bet I could use less than that. I could SSH from my phone to a dev server and just work off a Bluetooth keyboard and the Terminus app. The advantages of being a powerful vimmer.

I am exactly the same but I got shot for work at it.

Interestingly enough with a Macbook I always only used one external monitor instead of 2 as I am used to. IMO the controls were kinda weird (for me) so it felt less painful just sticking to one.

For me, it's not so much the screen size as the ergonomics. Haviong the screen at the correct height to enable good posture. Separate mouse an keyboard for comfort.

Sure, although that’s also very much achievable with a laptop stand.

But you can't type when the laptop is on a laptop stand.

Then you need an external keyboard, mouse and mousepad. At that point you're not far off from just slapping a monitor on the table instead of a laptop stand.

The difference is huge: a keyboard and mouse and laptop stand fit very easily into a backpack / briefcase, where an additional monitor does not

You should look up portable monitors. They are crazy small, cheap and good nowadays.

You can get a 15-16" OLED external display with a battery for around 300 western monetary units. Half that if you stick to IPS panels[0]. You can shove one of those in a backpack easily.

[0] https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Portable-Monitor-Connection-Raspb...

how do you deal with 4-up situations - where you need the comp or design doc, the code, the test window, and the debugger / dev tools, all available for you to glance back and forth between?

Apple sells a 15 foot MBP?

Branded the iWall.

Modifying code is like a mix of surgery and construction. In both cases, you need a plan.

If your plan cannot be executed by Grug's 120-character-wide text editor, it is too complex and should be broken into smaller steps.

I could dig a hole with a shovel but I'd rather use an excavator if one's around.

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