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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

> The bezels and gaps in between the monitors introduce distractions and one is limited in how one may arrange terminals and windows across multiple displays.

To me, the segmentation is a feature. It lets me offload information density and focus. For example, I commonly have an editor on one screen, a browser on the second, and something like a chat app, terminal, etc on the laptop screen.

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Nobody's stopping you from segmenting one big monitor into different regions; and you get to choose how big those regions are from day to day rather than being forced into it.

That's too much extra work. With multiple monitors you can maximize primary apps while still having manual management of smaller supporting apps on another monitor. You also get more edges for rapid snap to the sides of a monitor.

You're not using the best window managers - most have customizable drag points or keybindings to get exactly what you want.

Since you seem to know about the best window managers, can you recommend one for MacOS which will let me direct focus to whichever window is left/right/down/up of the currently selected one? i3/sway does this just fine, but my impression is that MacOS's api doesn't allow third party developers to pull it off, but I'd love to be wrong about that.

Not the person you were asking, but after years of using i3, AeroSpace is the only way I can use a Mac productively, and does indeed have the feature you're describing.

Wow. Thanks for this. I've bounced off a number of tiling WMs on MacOS over the years - Amethyst, Yabai, others I can't remember - but Aerospace is really excellent. Can't believe I've never heard of it before. Love the custom implementation of spaces as a solution to what ails a number of other tiling WMs. I installed it this morning and disabled the mish-mash of Rectangle Pro, Better Touch Tool and OS kb shortcuts I'd been using.

the article mentions https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai, which i have been using for a few years to get me to 90% parity with i3.

it has quirks and limitations, some of which can be fixed by disabling system integrity protection but it can definitely handle window tiling and navigating with keybindings when you use the companion daemon https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd

I use yabai which does what you say and more pretty well. It also lets you completely remove spaces transition effect but this will require disabling of SIP.

Even Windows has this with PowerToys.

I use 3 monitors but would switch to 1 if games respected the dimensions and 8k displays could refresh at 360Hz.

Although if that big monitor is an OLED, segmenting it into halves or quarters is kind of begging to end up with a line burned in down or across the middle eventually.

I'm imagining a tiling window manager screensaver that slowly resizes and moves your window boundaries throughout the day

Samsung solves this in the TV itself. It can be annoying when the edges of the screen are ever so slightly off, but i'm glad I don't have to worry about it. QCQ90S. I wouldn't recommend it since the tv's gui is glacially slow, but then again all the ones I tried last year were.

Many OLED monitors and TVs already do this, it's called pixel shifting.

A Panasonic Viera plasma TV I bought around 2012 also had this feature.

They tend to be relatively poorly handled by the software, at least out of the box.

Every modern major OS now has some level of tiling/splitting on a monitor's edges baked into their window manager by default now. Some can be tweaked to split into smaller subgroups, but that often requires less well tested/polished options (some apps just ignore the hints), or even third party extensions.

Works great with Display Fusion on Windows.

I am (҂`_´)

Continuously micro-manage the layout of individual application windows your window manager is a form of procrastination.

Back to work!

In theory, that would be the solution. In practice I read about all sorts of weird edge cases and bugs when trying to do that.

Some discussions over here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/

Anything fullscreen? How are you segmenting sub displays easily in that scenario?

I have done this in the past using a tilling window manager and it's still better to use different displays. There is something about our monkey brains that makes 'different physical object = do different things' work better than all having it on the same monitor.

I did get it to work for me with thick black bars between the screens, but when you're giving up an inch of screen real estate for every virtual monitor then you might as well get physical ones.

I use a single ultrawide at home and dual-monitors at work.

Initially thought having one monitor experience was more seamless, but I do miss implicit window organizational aspect that dual monitors provide. And screensharing on the ultra-wide is a pain.

FancyZones does exist to help with some of this if you're on windows:

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

My Samsung ultra wide has side by side mode with two input cables. Screen sharing (and Windows) thinks it’s two monitors but I can stretch windows all the way across both if I want to since it is an extended set

Best of both worlds, I wish there were a way to configure this within the OS so that you could make a single screen appear like 2, 3, or 4 logical screens.

A decent window management tool (e.g. Rectangle.app) should resolve most of your window management issues - set up many drag points to easily divide windows by half, thirds, quarters, sixths, etc.

Most screen share apps should support sharing by window. Also best for privacy (so your viewers don't see the side channel chat notifications pop up).

Also an ultrawide monitor is preferable for spreadsheet warriors.

I will not give up my 49" 21x9 for anything lesser.

If your ultrawide is anything like mine, it also has a setting that lets it register as two separate monitors (PIP/PBP mode), which is like having two monitors without the bezel, but with the convenience of "there's an edge" in the middle of your screen when doing regular desktop work.

Does require two cables of course, but if you're driving an ultrawide, you're probably using a graphics card with three or four outputs anyway.

The Dell Ultrasharp 43 4K monitor [1] has a mode where it pretends to be four monitors, one in each quadrant.

> four unique FHD partitions via Internal Multi-Stream Transport (iMST) when connected to a single PC

That's nice for people to organize their windows without needing to figure out a tiling window manager. If only it was 8K instead of 4K...

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-43-4k-usb-c-...

As a configurable feature, this would be a killer option.

Personally, I'd love an 8k which could act as two 4k in the middle, and two vertical 1920x4320 sides.

I use vertical monitors for documents, documentation, and word-processing.

Same, I've never liked spanning a window across multiple monitors. The discontinuity of the bezel is a handy mental break. Often I'll have email and teams on one screen and my main item of work on the central screen.

Same. This utility is also multiplied by having a separate set of virtual desktops on each display, which lets one create sets of windows/apps that can be mix-matched between screens, reducing the amount of window-shuffling to almost nothing after initial setup.

This is only possible under macOS and Linux, unfortunately. On Windows virtual desktops are still kind of a weird hack that spans one desktop across all monitors.

Same, not to mention I can wrap them around me better with mounting arms so that I'm looking at each head on just by turning my head a bit.

Yeah that issue seems weird to me, because I've never found bezels themselves to be that much of a problem. Like sure, less bezel is better. But I have some pretty wide gaps in my work monitors, and I've never found it to be a problem.

This article, and a lot of "productivity" articles, feel like spending a lot of time and effort for marginal-at-best improvements. I don't know their specific workflow, but I'm pretty sure they could get basically the same amount of productivity with a handful of 1080p monitors.

Its not a problem until you want to watch a movie or play a game, then you have a black bar down the middle. Compared with the opposite or just having one screen to split as youd like virtually.

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