Hacker News Reader

Comment by f311a | Hacker News Reader

I think most people lack horizontal space more than vertical. Too much vertical space makes your neck tired.

> I think most people lack horizontal space more than vertical.

Is this your own experience? I’ve personally rarely suffered for horizontal space, but very often for a bit more vertical space, especially with web-browsing now being so vertically cluttered.

I think many workflows are top-to-bottom in a way that benefits from more vertical space to keep it all in view - though development is probably exceptionally well-suited. My current setup (cribbed from an ex-colleague) is two vertical screens side-by-side, and I miss it whenever I’m working with a horizontal display.

Yeah, it's my own experience. I'm so used to horizontal splits in the terminal and editor. I can't imagine using vertical splits for code.

I don’t exclusively use vertical splits - often I opt for a four-corner split if I need more than 2 panes at a time.

But your avoidance of vertical splits likely comes for the same reasons I have a rotated screen - shrinking the vertical space in a buffer by any amount on a horizontal display quickly hits some kind of ergonomic limit where you just can’t see enough of the file at a time. I find that not only splits, but also console output, search results , etc. take up too much vertical space.

I miss vertical space a lot when browsing websites on a small screen. There is:

- The OS toolbar

- The browser tab and url bar

- often: A fixed website header

- sometimes: A fixed website footer

Sometimes I'm left with only ~600px of vertical content space. Which isn't much for reading content, much less for skimming it or getting an overview.

> The browser tab

You can have vertical tabs in Firefox without any plugins now.

On my laptop, I have tabs on the left, and the status bar and dock are hidden unless I need to see them.

Regarding headers, in my browser, I have a built-in option to disable sticky headers. I don't remember any sticky footers.

1 and 2 are easily solved by pressing F11.

Are website header and footer that common nowadays? I tend to think it is more a thing from the past nowadays.

In the past I've agreed but this setup might just hit a sweet-spot, sitting at home the laptop is usually on a table and you keep looking downwards. Just tried setting up my USB-screen above my laptop and got pleasantly surprised by how I can look straight on the upper one.

Basically, upper part of this roll-up becomes a good "main-screen" and you can still have an auxillary lower part for extra stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com