Web content fits better on a tall monitor | Hacker News Reader

Web content fits better on a tall monitor

dailydot.com

28 pointswmat48 comments

Or, if you're a programmer, this:

  ============================================== 
  |                                            |
  |            ---------------------           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |     (webpage)     |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            |                   |           |
  |            ---------------------           |
  |                                            |
  ==============================================

becomes this:

  ============================================== 
  |                                            |
  | -------------------- --------------------  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |     (webpage)    | |      (code)      |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | |                  | |                  |  |
  | -------------------- --------------------  |
  |                                            |
  ==============================================

Your comment is worth a thousand words.

This is true of pretty much any line of work that requires to-ing and fro-ing between things - translation (source language / target language), graphic design (draw area / toolbars) etc.

Pretty much the only use for a vertical screen placement I can think of is browsing, as written in the article. Or, arguably, something like unobtrusive writing.

What I came here to say. If the screen is wider, it just means I can position two things side by side, what ever that be: email + webpage, word document + webpage, code + webpage, code + command line

Humans have almost 180 degrees field of view horizontally and 135 degrees vertically. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view) Wide screen makes more sense. Put two browsers next to each other on a wide screen and you're no longer have the empty bands shown in the article.

If you need to see more vertical real estate on a site use a higher resolution monitor or a larger one. Biology gave us a wide screen field of view. Use it.

Assuming my eyes are normal, the actual field of view is wide and tall enough that it's pretty immaterial. A monitor will fit with plenty room to spare both vertically and horizontally.

Nope. Neutralized by the fact that our language is read top-to-bottom. Thus, so is all content. And eyes don't actually read lines of text well if they are 18 inches wide, it turns out. Which is why books are, by and large, printed in vertical orientations.

Though if you open a book, you actually have a landscape view of two pages, side-by-side.

Until you fold one half of it around back.

I disagree on the wide screen field of view.

From what I understand, reading comprehension actually improves with text in contained width (i.e. columns) [1][2]. My experience in using a higher res monitor is that it takes a bit more effort to read the (smaller) text. Larger + higher res combination might work though.

PS. I run a two-vertical / portrait monitor configuration and it makes my job a lot easier to orient myself within the code.

[1] - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ColumnModeSometimesBetterThanWidespan [2] - http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/3553/why-do...

Their basic argument is true but they completely ignore the fact that you can have two windows side by side on a wider screen monitor. Another issue they don't mention is some LCDs have shit viewing angles and if you are staring at them that way the colours differ from the middle to the ends. It sure would be nice if they brought back 4:3 though.

TL;DR: webpages can look better and contain more information if your screen is portrait instead of landscape.

Personally, I'm afraid about the ergonomics of such a setup. Our necks and eyes are better built for looking left and right. not up and down.

Unfortunately, last I checked, most OSes don't properly handle subpixel antialiasing on monitors in non-standard orientations. They use the assumption that the red subpixel is to the left of the right one, which is violated when you rotate the monitor. See here, for example: http://superuser.com/questions/265413/portrait-monitor-orien....

Yes, but with 4k monitors, we no longer need subpixel antialiasing. Just disable it!

Luckily you can easily change this on Linux :)

As a user of dual monitors, one vertical and one horizontal, I have to admit, there's nothing that makes me happier than full screen Vim on the vertical 23" monitor.

I use that configuration too. Which Linux distro do you use? I have found that not all of them seem to support that configuration (or at least, I could never set it with Ubuntu... OpenSUSE does support it fine though).

Ubuntu's control panel (gnome-settings) has never failed me for this (12.04+) and if you're into kinky CLI commands, xrandr is your friend. It is a sane wrapper that helps you configure your displays in an almost natural language:

    xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 1024x768 --rotate 180 \
      --output VGA1 --mode 640x480 --right-of eDP1

(From memory, dont paste this to the bank)

I don't know... I try to keep my functions and files short enough that I don't need that vertical space. :)

I prefer horizontal mode and 2/3 horizontal splits. For some reason, that works better than vertical splits for me.

I got a similar setup, one vertical and one horizontal. I got an Emacs frame for both of them but end up doing most coding with the vertical monitor and using the horizontal one for peripheral tasks (browsing, calc-mode, reading docs, etc).

This has never worked out (for me) the way people think it does. When I'm reading, I'm not looking at the entire document all at once, I'm looking at one line of the document. And if I have to start craning my neck in one direction or the other to see the whole thing (24" creates a lot of space to look at when an arms length away), it will start to hurt. Better, IMO, to take advantage of the horizontal space with a few split text windows for side by side viewing and be "resigned" to do a bit of scrolling.

Probably most people here are smart enough to understand the benefits and drawbacks without reading this article at all, but here's a TLDR: if you routinely look at one long web page at at time (and aren't worried about straining your neck), then you might be better served orienting your monitor vertically.

Good luck trying this with a 16:9 display. When it's rotated, a 1920×1080 resolution just isn't wide enough.

Any website that isn't happy with 700-800 pixels horizontally is broken (I'm looking at you Westlaw). Narrow columns of text are just better: http://www.ninjapost.com/blog/on-the-importance-of-narrow-co....

Fine, so lots of the websites I read are broken. I still need to read them though.

I find I like things the opposite way - if I want to read narrow columns of text, I'll read a newspaper. My browser is not a newspaper, however, and I prefer sites that expand to fit the browser's width.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that sites that enforce this kind of narrow text (an exaggeration in order to make a point I must confess), to be entirely off-putting, and liable to lose a reader, and to have their bounce rate increased. These types of sites usually have huge columns of white space at either side of their text - space which could be put to better use displaying text, rather than trying to dictate my browsing/reading experience.

We're talking about layouts that prevent you from making the window narrower than 1080 pixels.

Nobody should be buying 16:9 monitors for computers to begin with. They aren't suitable.

you mean, nobody should be selling them, but ignorant buyers (== most of the market) look for 'Full HD' sticker instead of actually asking for advice.

i guess somebody should invent a 'Better than Full HD' sticker.

Behold, the best of both worlds: http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.ht...

The Eizo EV2730Q is my dream monitor made real. I never thought it would be made in a consumer market but it's really here. Crossing my fingers for a North American release and at a price that's < $1000. Ideally I would have preferred 2560x2048 (exactly 4x my current monitor of 1280x1024) but I'll take what I can get.

I have a dual-monitor set-up - both widescreen - mounted on a dual monitor arm.

I trialled turning the left monitor 90 degrees so that I run Pycharm on the left monitor in a portrait orientation.

It works fine when you're coding. The only trouble was the arrangement kind of triggers some latent OCD in me and I couldn't tolerate the asymmetry for long ;)

So it was back to the symmetric widescreen arrangement.

I didn't try putting both monitors at 90 degrees though. Perhaps I should - although the widescreen arrangement is needed for playing Elite: Dangerous ;)

Biggest benefit of portrait is you can instantly subconsciously see more about how long the article is. This is really most useful in the cases when the end of the article is visible on the first screenful in portrait mode and it wouldn't have been visible in landscape mode. This gives one a pleasurable immediate knowledge of how long the article is, how soon it's going to wrap up, etc. It was also quite nice in the Google Reader UI where you could get an idea of what was coming next.

But that comes at several costs. One is that text is less frequently at your optimal reading height. Often the text will be too high or too low for comfortable reading. So you end up having to either scroll frequently with a mouse wheel or touchpad or say scroll say half page at a time with the keyboard.

Having text at a non-optimal height is also annoying when using text editors in this portrait mode. Sure you can see more, but more often what you want to edit or read closely will be too high or too low unless you use C-l (emacs binding) frequently to center it.

Also, for those people who haven't given up their mouse yet, it can be very annoying to move the mouse this much distance. If you have part of a UI at the top (say tabs, menus, toolbar etc) and then part of a UI at the bottom (say find box or start menu or media player controls or) then moving the mouse that distance can be an annoyance.

And even if you don't use a mouse, then you will now have crucial parts of the UI (like minibuffer or mode-line or gnuscreen status line) at the very bottom of the screen in an uncomfortable-to-read position.

Overall from my experience I loved it for getting an overview of webpages, for Google Reader, or seeing entire pdf pages at once, but not much else.

The problem isn't widescreen monitors, the problem is full screen UIs that don't need to be full screen. The benefit of widescreen isn't that your content can be super wide, it's that you can view multiple pieces of reasonably wide content simultaneously. If I turned my monitors sideways I'd severely impact that ability.

I've found vertical-oriented monitors to be just 'blah' for what I do (Windows/C# development.) Many of the Windows IDEs out there seem to realize that monitors are wider than they are tall, so various tool panels in the tool are on the right and left of the editor. Between the space used up for line numbers, breakpoints, resharper annotations, and other trim on the left, plus the solution explorer (file tree) on the right, there's only about enough room for 100-120 character lines in the editor.

My IDEs are about the only thing that I run full-screen. The other monitors have multiple windows open, sometimes docked split left-right and sometimes slightly overlapping. Windows makes this easier with left-right auto dock, where it doesn't have up-down docking.

Actually, I think the real problem is people using their smartphones wrong this whole time: I think the endless push toward ever-larger phones is due to a lack of encouragement from the marketing and UI for using the things in the usually-far-more-readable landscape mode.

For me, the largest benefit of a big smartphone is more space for the keyboard.

And, of course, add to this that lots of sites are broken and will not work well in landscape mode.

It totally depends on what you're doing. Landscape is the clear winner for video. Some people like having one tall window for reading/writing code, though I (and most other competent programmers I know) would just as soon have multiple windows/panes side by side in landscape. The one case where portrait clearly wins is web pages that fail to take advantage of greater width with multiple columns etc. That's not me failing to use my monitor properly. That's the website designer failing to use my window properly. If designers weren't such twits about making things look decent only in their own preferred setup, portrait mode would never make sense for me.

Or, y'know, you could have two (or more) non-maximized windows side by side.

It's kind of jarring to see screenshots of full-screened web pages.

This may betray my 90's Mac heritage (since until somewhat recently Mac OS window management hasn't even supported full-screen) I think the only things I've ever full-screened in my life are (1) videos (2) photo editing.

When I'm browsing and messing around, I have my browser surrounded by chat windows, when I'm working I have terminal windows, documentation and notes spread around.

Anyway on wide screens I can suggest putting your dock on the right side of the screen instead of the bottom to make more efficient use of space.

Portrait-oriented monitors are pretty indispensable to me, ever since I saw somebody using his monitor vertically a couple years ago. Terminal output is more readable vertically, config files are easier too (very short lines), and if you stick to the pretty typical 80 characters for code files, you fit 2x more in the same window.

I use a tiling window manager to maximize usability, and go for the old standby tie-fighter monitor configuration.

The major loss in most cases is viewing angle, though. It's hard to get somebody to check code with me if it's invisible from their desk.

Of course, you should be aware that sub-pixel rendering is not available in portrait mode. Also, wide screens are pretty decent if you're not in the habit of having every single window maximised. Putting things side by side works fine!

Yes! I was hoping I'd see at least one comment about this. I tried portrait mode once and everything looked like crap, and I realized it's because ClearType couldn't be tuned to handle the pixel layout for a rotated monitor.

I'm waiting for EIZO's 1920x1920 EV2730Q, a 1:1 display.

No, thanks. A wide enough monitor and I can show three buffers in Vim horizontally fitting >80 cols in each using reasonable font size. As a programmer, this is invaluable.

sure, this might make the most sense for web pages, but for programming, I prefer to view my files in columns, and landscape maximizes the number of columns on the screen.

I remember a pic of John Carmarck coding on a huge rotated monitor, but my google-fu powers are failing me and can't find the pic.

Yes, you have been using your monitor wrong. Try a tilling wm and you'll never go back.

tbh i like widescreen as i can stack 2 pages of 2 different things. (like 1 terminal + 1 doc) i dont spent my day reading the news tho so there's that...

WIN-LEFT, or WIN-RIGHT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com