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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> The resolution of an A4 piece of paper is a crisp 3508px x 2480px. For comparison, my MacBook Air is about a third of that at 1440px x 900px.

Not to mention how infinitely more convenient paper is to handle than laptops, and while I can easily spread 10 A4 pages in front of me to look at them simultaneously, I doubt my company will buy me 9 more computers to do the equivalent "digital" thing...

That's why I occasionally even print out code - usually when I know I'll spend a lot of time changing a particular file, and I'm having a hard time understanding it or maintaining focus. Paper + color pens facilitate thinking better than an open IDE.

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> Not to mention how infinitely more convenient paper is to handle than laptops, and while I can easily spread 10 A4 pages in front of me to look at them simultaneously, I doubt my company will buy me 9 more computers to do the equivalent "digital" thing...

People nowadays laugh at how people in Star Trek always had multiple PADDs and sorted through them like a stack of papers or books, but at the end of the day trying to cross reference several sources to do work on a single iPad can be very frustrating.

There's probably a huge market for super thin portable (wireless) displays. If I could grab a handful of displays and wirelessly link them with my laptop while using gestures to move content between them, I'd probably pay a few hundred dollars per display. (I imagine the drawback of them being wireless would be a really slow refresh rate, so you likely wouldn't be able to watch video on them.)

If you placed a magnet on the back of them you can throw one on the wall when you get home and it could detect it's location in the room and start serving as some other systems interface.. like a thermostat or something. Then pick it up on your way out the door and it connects to your phone or laptop.

No reason more than 2 thin displays couldn't spread out of this laptop in the future: https://www.wired.com/2017/01/razers-project-valerie-insane-... :P

I was thinking something more versatile that could have many different uses, but that's cool none-the-less.

I love printing out an interesting bit of code (usually 3 or 4 pages max), grabbing a cup of coffee and a pencil and working through the logic while sitting out on the back porch in the fresh air.

Edit: I also keep a paper programming journal for writing down thoughts about code/bugs I've worked on.

I wonder if VR will live out to the hype would it be good development environment. Would it be so good that the obvious disadvantage of having something on one's face would be passable.

I know that right now the resolution is not there. Also maybe AR would be better.

I wonder now also how to do better code exploration software. Current development tools are usually tied more to the editing than to the exploration of the code base. Exploration is IMO much more important.

>That's why I occasionally even print out code

I recently had a project where I converted a ~2k loc project from "FORCE" (a homebrewed extension of FORTRAN) into C, and the first thing I did was print out the whole project into a 15 page packet to annotate the code. There was not a single comment past headers.

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