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Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

> At our office, we just equipped all of the programmers' workstations with Seiki 39" 4K televisions as monitors. [...] For the time being, there is no single higher-productivity display for a programmer.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm most productive on a 13" laptop. I can change my work place and position as I want, plus only one app fitting on the screen actually helps me focus. Emacs/tmux/IDE users can do most programming work in a single application anyway.

I've used a 27" monitor and before that two 20" monitors for years. It was great for other activities, but when it comes to programming, it only distracted me.

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It's not just you.

While reading the article I was thinking "wow, these guys are using 39" monitors, while I'm perfectly happy with a single 17" monitor or a 13" laptop. There must be something wrong with me."

Emacs is my screen space saviour. Every file or shell is 3 key presses away, I just don't need extra monitors.

Have you tried emacs in portrait mode on a bigger screen?

I've tried it on a 24in monitor running at 1920x1200 in portrait mode. Its great for editing text. I found that a good setup was to split the screen vertically and have 2 windows, one on top of the other. It doesn't really work well when splitting horizontally.

How do you use frames and windows in emacs? Even on a single screen, I've generally got at least a couple of columns up, so I can understand the utility of greater real estate. With multiple monitors, you can open two frames up, use next-multiframe-window and it mostly behaves like a giant emacs across two screens.

That said, I almost exclusively work on a 15" retina MBP and don't find myself annoyed, so I guess you're right. :)

I use multiple monitors for having my editor on one screen and having on the other screen:

1. My database design for reference

2. A web browser for when I google how to do a particular thing

3. Specifications for the project I'm working on

4. Example code from other things I have written in the past

These things make me a more productive programmer. I don't see a legitimate reason as to why multiple monitors wouldn't make someone more productive but let me know what I'm missing!

I prefer:

> 12" 1440x900 (X200s)

> 14.1" 1440x900 (T400)

Resolution is big enough, mobile, keyboard is normal sized and you can see your coworker while talking to him.

MBPr 15" @ 2880 * 1800, scaled to the smallest possible size. It's awesome.

I'm currently doing my hobby programming projects on a 10 inch screen (asus t100), and have set up my flow so that i don't need a bigger screen.

I used to have a three monitor setup, but at some point realized that all that real estate was preventing me to focus. Now i only want one window on screen at a time. Alt+tab is my extra screen real estate. My usual screen is 22 inches and that's about the maximum size for putting windows fullscreen.

You must not work from lengthy spec documents that often.

I'd rather scroll than tilt my head up and down to read. And I can only read one thing at a time, so it doesn't give me any benefit to have both documentation and code on screen at the same time.

I write lengthy spec documents on that 22 inch screen ;)

I use a logitech m500 with the inertial scrollwheel, so scrolling through long documents is easy. Also, word's navigation pane makes it easy to jump from point to point. The 22 inch screen is just large enough to see the full page width and the nav pane side by side.

When implementing long spec documents, i print them out and mark off the parts i've completed. There would be no added value from having a second screen where i do that digitally for me personally. (I did try it once.)

This is the first I've heard of another programmer using the T100. Are you using it as a terminal to a more powerful computer, or as the actual computer? If the latter, what does your dev environment consist of, and what platform(s) are you programming for?

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