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Comment by solox3 | Hacker News Reader

I have recently gotten a taste of ultra high resolution monitors.

My coworker got the new Dell XPS 15, which has a QHD+ 3200x1800 screen. Just a heads up to coders, unless you plan to hunch your back or get new glasses, very few of you will enjoy the screen as much as you think you would.

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Why's that? I picked up a QHD+ Samsung a few weeks ago and have been loving it for development work. All of the development tools I've needed so far have respected Windows' DPI scaling (which came set at 200% on the Samsung, making it easy to spot when a program failed to scale correctly).

The only major culprit so far has been Dropbox, which is infuriatingly frustrating to use at HiDPI. So bad it makes me want to move everything to SkyDrive or Google Drive.

How much do you actually interact with dropbox's UI? I would think that most of the time you would just be using it through the standard file/directory interaction things (file browsers, shell, etc).

Configuring selective sync (which was a must since this was on a laptop with a relatively small SSD) is particularly excruciating, and I do need to tweak that from time to time when large folders are added. The window that pops up when you click the system tray icon also has the scaling issue, which is something that I do need to interact with on a daily basis. Luckily, it's not quite a bad as the selective sync configuration, but it's still pretty rough.

I've been living on a Retina MBP, which has a comparably 4x resolution, and I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion: if you work with text, you need a super-dense screen ASAP. I don't know how Windows handles it, but in OS X, "Retina" support means that e.g. my Emacs windows look amazing -- even as Java-garbage like Intelli-J look like some sort of Motif abomination.

Um, what? IntelliJ has supported HiDPI since about a month after the Retina MBPs shipped. It looks great.

The intent with these kinds of high DPI screens is usually to use scaling and keep interface elements roughly the same physical size (like Apple does with the RMBP), not to make everything tiny and still pixelated. If you spend all day looking at text it looks fantastic on a high density display.

Support on Windows isn't perfect, but most programs handle it well by now.

Set DPI scaling to get it to 2560x1440 "equivalent"? Not a general solution since so many apps misbehave, but if you're coding and spending most of the time in the editor, you get the extra real estate, plus the extra crispness in font rendering.

With DPI scaling set to 2x in Windows 8.1, text editors look no different than on a 1600x900 screen.

I code all day in Sublime on a 2560x1440 13" laptop at 1.5x scaling (Asus UX301LA-DH71T).

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