Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlarocco | Hacker News Reader

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My dislike is that it loses a bunch of vertical space.

1920x1080 screens have 10% less vertical space than the older 1600x1200 screens. When writing code, it would be nice to have the extra 120 pixels available to see more of the file without scrolling. When reading PDFs or ebooks I'd like to see a single large page instead of two small pages right next to each other. Same with webpages - 99.9% of websites are hard coded to be <1000 pixels wide. It's pretty rare I need to see two websites side by side, but I have to do extra vertical scrolling a million times a day.

I've never seen the benefit of tiling a bunch of windows, either. I can only concentrate on one window at a time, so, IMO, showing a million windows just adds a bunch of distraction.

Widescreen is nice for watching movies, but terrible for everything I spend time doing on the computer.

Widescreen is also quite awkward in a portrait format, which I really liked with some old 1600x1200 displays, especially once you hit 3 monitors or more. Very nice vertical resolution, and you don't run into the "surveying my lordly domain" problem. Sure, a high enough resolution would be okay, too, as I wouldn't care as much whether I'd look at two 1200x1600 monitors side-by-side or one widescreen monitor with a 1600-ish v-res, but in all these years. there are only a few monitors that go beyond 1920/1600x1200, and most of them are ridiculously overpriced.

I typically work around this by having dual monitors and having one mounted vertically and the other horizontally.

What monitors do you use?

I've tried that a couple times now, and always revert to having both horizontal because rectangular pixel shapes were messing up the font rendering.

Right now it's Samsung SyncMaster 2443s. The trick is to go into the font stuff and explain the LCD layout to the font renderer. I think MacOS already does this but on Linux it's usually somewhere in Appearance.

I think there are plenty of arguments for both sides and it comes down to a matter of personal taste and habit.

The lack of vertical space helps me keep my functions short and to the point.

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