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Comment by dustin999 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, do you feel a little ridiculous with that setup? I'm a coder and have 2x24" monitors, and found that to be borderline ridiculous with neck strain, thus the reason I'm going 27". But unless you're running security at a place of business or something with 50 security cams, I can't imagine what you're doing that requires a wall of monitors?

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Our philosophy in the office is that alt-tab is for suckers. While my setup is the most over the top we have three other people with five monitors or more. We are all security researchers and find the configuration saves a bunch of time in reviews. As an example, I can associate a MitM proxy like the Burpsuite or Fiddler 2 with the server side application which might communicate to web clients as well as to additional web services behind the scenes. That takes up one monitor, typically the one at the far top left. Under that monitor I can then associate another MitM proxy with the client. I can then run the client from my laptop display. If I'm working on a fat client, on the 30" I'll then run Wireshark which will effectively be watching the client. On another monitor I can run sysinternal tools. What remains I use for writing code necessary for the review, running additional tools like Metasploit, e-mail, chat, and research. I arrange my workspace for the task at hand. On a daily basis do I use all nine? No.

Interestingly enough, with this sort of setup it's pretty easy to visually see what's happening when going after an application. Before going to the monitor extreme I'd constantly alt-tab between my monitoring & exploit tools with every action. Now I can run an action and see the results within one workspace. Of course there is a massive downside. It makes competing in CTFs a pain in the butt as I can't drag that setup with me to physical events.

A bit off-topic, but what CTF team do you play on?

THD+N.

Dumb question, but which CTF game/mod are you referring to?

He isn't. It's a term to describe security competitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag#Computer_secu...

Presumably they're talking about security, not an FPS mod: https://ctftime.org/ctf-wtf/

It's a gamification of security analysis. Teams are pitted against one another trying to exploit a system to achieve a goal.

Surely you still use the keyboard to switch keyboard/mouse focus? But instead of Alt-tab another key combo?

The moment I use more than 1 screen, I find alt-tab to be cumbersome. I find that in a GUI environment, having your mouse autofocus on the window it's hovering over is far easier than using alt-tab. Especially when you have multiple windows open, cylcing to the correct window using alt-tab is usually slower than moving the mouse over the window.

Just what I was thinking. How on earth do you find the cursor never mind navigate it from one corner to the other.

> Our philosophy in the office is that alt-tab is for suckers.

Which is why I've partly switched from Unity to xmonad (a tiling window manager). Dual monitors is nice to have for me, but the real boon was to have 9 (or 10?) easily accessible workspaces, which allows me to only have to worry about a handful or less windows in each workspace. Unity also have workspaces, but they suck (at least out of the box).

I can't go back from three monitors (currently running 24" displays):

  Left     Portrait, Terminator with two horizontal splits
  Centre   Landscape, Vim with a vertical split, usually have NERDTree open
  Right    Portrait or landscape, browser and/or documentation

I find if I don't have all of those constantly open I can miss stuff, and having them all squished onto a single monitor means I'm not able to display enough information to cover my needs.

I just got my fourth monitor. Two of them are old shitty 900p screens though. My main displays are my new 144hz 24" 1080p panel ($160 black friday sale) a 21.5" 1080p panel over hdmi, and the two shitty old panels I got from clients throwing out their old screens.

Usually the layout is IDE on the main window, docs on the second screen, IRC, git, and github on the third / fourth.

If you're getting neck strain from using 2 monitors try moving them further away. Ideally you want both screens in your front facing FOV, with only your eyes doing the moving.

Back in the day, I was much happier with two 4:3/5:4 monitors than I am with two 16:9 monitors, as you say the neck strain... or wasted space is a bit ridiculous. I prefer two squarish monitors to 2x widescreens _or_ giant screens.

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