Ask HN: Best Hacks for a Ultrawide Monitor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best Hacks for a Ultrawide Monitor?

6 pointsExorust15 comments

Any awesome suggestions/tips/tricks for a ultrawide monitor?

If you are using MacOS, I recommend these 2 apps

1. "Rectangle" for window management https://rectangleapp.com/ 2. "BetterDisplay" for better scaling quality on bigger screens, especially if you have a 4k ultrawide. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

If you're using Raycast app already, you can easily control your windows using just a few shortcuts.

I have a 49 inch CRG9 and the best recommendation for window management is Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) along with skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd). Yabai is a greedy window management solution that tries to fit opened applications in given space and skhd let's you easily jump between those using keyboard shortcuts. This has massively improved my ultrawide experience.

Only disclaimer is, configuring yabai has a slight learning curve.

came here to suggest yabai. do you have a way of preserving layouts between reboots? I manually configure layouts every startup but want to improve on that..

It provites great user experience in news web-sites if being used in vertical mode. News websites became greedy in receiving different kinds of activity from user (close cookie banner, close subscribe banner, close some video with overlay which fires after first scroll). And they love to give you nothing except header and few lines if you have not scrolled on your 1920x1080 monitor. But on vertical ultrawide it is possible to read most of the publication before giving any activity bits of my mouse to the webmaster and if the publication is not interesting I can understand it without reacting to the pesky AJAX features.

Definitely try out fancyzones from powertoys if you're on Windows. For Linux I'm not really sure, not much of a Linux desktop environment type, but I'm sure there's something for gnome. Lg makes a software I think it's called screen split, but fancy zones is better in my opinion. I run six 34 inch 2k ultrawides. I use the "edges" for stuff on the back burner - main content goes in the middle. It you have the right monitor some ultrawides can split inputs if you have multiple machines/ sources. That could be useful for dual os or work & personal setups.

The lenovo (and some other) ultrawide can be driven as two monitors butted side by side, which means you can scroll or pan halves independently.

Doesn't seem to work in OSX alas.

Use a tiling window manager. I use Moom on Mac to create a three-column grid.

You missed the scroll and pan part. If you use (work) spaces then without more effort (tm) tiling is only partially the same as keeping one screen set while the other moves to another space.

Otherwise yes.

Any windows suggestions?

A bit basic, but I've been using "FancyZones" [1] from Microsoft's PowerToys [2] (installable via winget) on my work machine.

It at least provides options to e.g. split the display into 3 zones, meaning I can keep my main window centered with a non-ludicrous width and I don't have to permanently look to one side.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

Interesting topic. Any suggestions for Linux?

GTile is really handy. I have it setup so my screen is divided 31/38/31 and control+num1 through num3 correlate to those segments and move windows there and maximize them to fill it.

Pretty awesome.

I can't live without gSnap GNOME extension after switching to a LG Ergo DualUp monitor.

Yes, get a second one to put above it.

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