Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

4k is awesome for a terminal nerd.

The first time I used a 50 inch 4K screen in full screen tmux/vim, I realized this is the correct way to program.

With such a big terminal screen you might even recreate what an 720p screen can, with 256 colors!

I never really understood why we like to hack character arrays into pixels, when.. we can just manipulate the pixels themselves? I mean, I like and actually prefer the cli interface of many programs, but can’t ever imagine replacing a good IDE with vim.

vim is a good IDE, so I'm not sure what you mean.

I'm not mad about your IDE or anything. I've used some that I could like okay, with vim keystrokes. But vim lives where I live, in the terminal. I can't run your IDE in my environment. I can run vim anywhere.

I use a 32" QHD for a more limited but similar effect. 32" 4k and the text was too small and thus the extra resolution just complicated everything but 32"QHD and a tiling window manager is awesome, I don't use a second monitor anymore after years of doing so.

That's only cause UI scaling sucks on Windows and linux. On MacOS, a 4k monitor works great.

So many apps on Windows, you might get the latest font rendering stack, you might get the old one, even in Windows' own settings UI

I am probably an edge case as I use a tiling WM on linux, there is little UI to be scaled. The only metric I am worried about is max text at my personally readable size. I could change the font sizes on a 4k monitor, but websites are the only non-text UI I interact with and they don't care about your OS settings. Zooming is hit or miss on if it breaks the layout or not. I don't doubt MacOS would be better in general, but for me a QHD 32" is plug and play, most websites work well and no settings faff or zooming.

Wayland implements the exact same supersampling based scaling that macOS has, Wayland scaling is even better performing than macOS'

it doesn't work great, elements are comically too big on 32" 4K or just too big on 27" 4K, you need to scale it to 1080p but then it's too small. MacOS is made for 5K 27" monitors for high DPI (Retina) resolutions or non-high DPI 27" 2560x1440. The only high-DPI 4K screen that works great OOB is the 21.5" 4K Apple display.

* https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpX561_XM20

on macOS there is SwitchResX and BetterDisplay where you can choose custom scaling options.

Too bad MacOS looks like dog shit on a lot of regular-ass monitors.

Not sure what I'd do at 32" but with a 27" 4K I run it scaled as 1080. Everything is sized how I would expect but text is just much crisper.

32" 4K feels like the sweet spot now, 32" 8K would be a good future upgrade, but we need DisplayPort and HDMI to catch up. 120hz is very nice for desktop usage, as is HDR. Now that my main rig is a 55" 4K 120hz HDR OLED, most other monitors look bad. 14" is still the best size MBP, as sitting closer with the high PPI screen works well to have text take up about the same amount of my FOV. 27" feels small, esp at 16:9. 16:10 was awesome and I'm glad that it and 4:3 are coming back. 16:9 was made for watching movies. 16:10 allows 16:19 content to fit with a menu bar + browser top bar + bottom bar, or just gives extra vertical space. Those ultrawide monitors, especially the curved ones, are just gimmicky. Just give me a gigantic 16:10 or 4:3 rectangle, tyvm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com