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Comment by supersrdjan | Hacker News Reader

yesss... I discovered how wrong the widescreen displays are after I had found an old IBM Thinkpad in my basement and tried it. To add to what you said, I will also point out that it's the vertical space that often gets pinched by toolbars and such, effectively squishing your working area to an even wider ratio. And when working with text (reading, writing), the left and right edges of my screen are just slabs of emptiness. Given all that, a taller display feels more roomy for the same surface area.

The only disadvantage though is that putting two windows/panes/buffers of anything side by side would no longer be as convenient?

Do you have a 3:2 screen yourself, which one?

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This is why and how I use a 5k ultra wide. It allows me to make two more-or-less square windows in the same monitor.

At least on OS X, using a free utility, I can set two apps to exactly split the screen with two key presses and one mouse click. ON a 16:9 it comes back to being an actually decent aspect ratio for reading text.

That's also part why I love the Firefox vertical tree-style tabs addon.

> the vertical space that often gets pinched by toolbars and such, effectively squishing your working area to an even wider ratio. And when working with text (reading, writing), the left and right edges of my screen are just slabs of emptiness.

Absolutely agree, and it’s amazing/infuriating when people/companies don’t realise it. My mom’s old Asus could barely fit a few lines of text on its small screen after all its toolbars in chrome. You shouldn’t need to scroll multiple times to read a 3-paragraph email on a display where it fits if it were the only text! (And of course about 60% of the space on the sides was wasted.)

I don’t have a 3:2 display yet, though I do have an old 16:10 21” monitor which is alright. My ipad (10.9”) is okayish as well, but I’m planning to buy a 16” 3:2 portable monitor soon. Do you have an 3:2 screens?

No, I was only aware of the Eizo models, too expensive for me, but am at this moment looking at various recommendations people are sharing in this thread.

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