I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen.
Any suggestions for this?
Any suggestions for this?
At my last startup, we all worked from our laptops with no external monitors. I got used to it after a few weeks, and found myself able to work fine like that for 2 years.
When I switched jobs and finally had access to a huge apple cinema display, it felt way too big. What do I need all this space for? Of course, I got used to that after a couple weeks, and now I have a hard time coding when I'm away from it.
I've noticed the same thing when I travel with only my tiny chromebook (with crouton): the first week it seems painfully small, then it's normal. And when I go back to my 15" mbp, it seems unnecessarily large.
YMMV, but my experience has been that whatever I use for a week or two is fine for me.
A few things that have helped me working with constrained real estate:
1) Terminal font choice - I switched to Inconsolata last year for my road laptop. Can drop font size to 10 and save serious column space without murdering your eyes.
2) High contrast syntax highlighting with light and dark themes - While I love Solarized on my desktop, glare can make it tough to read. I often switch to Tomorrow (http://chriskempson.github.io/base16/#tomorrow) dark or light depending on the conditions.
3) Buffer navigation plugins - The biggest productivity sink of the small, horizontal laptop screen is the reduced real estate for code. You end up spending way more time navigating up and down a file than on a bigger screen. As I use vim, I use EasyMotion (https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) to make that navigation fast. Repeating the last motion in particular is super useful.
Hope that helps.
As Adam Carolla jokes, if you use chapstick every day, then suddenly you notice that you can't live without chapstick. But, if you never use it, then you don't need it. A lot of things are like this, including, I think, multiple monitors. Go without them for a while and you'll find that they're really not necessary.
I'm not sure what you use, but I've found that just keeping a really organized workspace helps a lot. I use KDE4 and have four workspaces set up: one for web browser, one for tiled ssh terminals, one for Sublime, and one for "everything else". They're always arranged in the same order, and I have an easy hotkey (ctrl-alt-left or right arrow) to switch between them
On my 11" Air, it gives me 225 columns and 65 rows of text in a terminal: http://geoff.greer.fm/images/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-05%20at...
If you have the space, moving any reference querying over to a tablet (iPad, etc) is one trick I use. Actually, the biggest use for my iPad is as a reference book.
If you go from a dual monitor setup to solo and back a lot, Stay will manage your windows and keep them in the same position (and crucially, the same size) when you plug your monitor back in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=portable+laptop+screen
Of course it would add to the energy consumption (and probably the energy used by the laptop), but the advantage is it's light, and in a travel-convenient form factor.
It's not ideal, but it's nice.
I find the size of my multiple monitor setup is less a concern than being able to mentally divide tasks/contexts. ymmv
I also like the idea of something like that, but with an AR approach. Map an AR virtual monitor to any flat surface or random space you want.
I'm sure there are way better things you can do with AR than just that (I just think it's a reasonable and useful naive first approach), so here's hoping someday soon :)
When I am busy, I shut off the world and get distraction-free. When I want to interact with others I composite the real world atop my VR world from the cameras, without ever lifting the headset.
Ghost in the Shell but much simpler.