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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why this article is only about laptops. It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too. I've been complaining about it for years. Widescreen is a terrible shape for code. I don't need more horizontal space, I need more lines. What am I going to use horizontal space for? People say turn the monitor vertical but that's horrible too. The screen is designed to be viewed at a certain angle for a start. 4:3 is perfect for me to be able to have two columns of code filling the entire screen.

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> Widescreen is a terrible shape for code.

I beg to differ. I have a UWQHD and love it for code. I can have 2 sets of code side by side (or a terminal) AND docs AND the website I'm working on, all visible without moving windows. Possibly also messaging apps.

I cannot fathom how someone wouldn't be able to appreciate working on a UWQHD monitor.

I can't look at that many things at once so I use the keyboard to switch between them. It's quicker than moving my head.

I have a 27" Apple monitor at work and it comfortably supports 3-4 columns of text in Sublime. I'd much rather be able to have an extra column available rather than an extra 100 lines in a 1-2 column layout.

Do you (or does anyone) know if Textmate has a feature to automatically wrap text from one column to another? I've looked for one and not found it. I know emacs will, albeit with typical difficulty, but I just can't go that far.

Definitely this. I get a nice 4 column layout that works great considering my code is generally 80 chars wide. I wish my monitor where actually 2:35:1 CinemaScope.

Widescreen was great for having multiple pages/windows open until the recent trend of apps going from having multiple windows to one window (ushered on by Windows (people people have been fullscreening since day one), webapps (where windowing isn't well-supported) and mobile/tablet-centric design).

I really despise how the Xcode team thinks that iTunes was a good inspiration for a UI.

True, but it's worse and goes much deeper than that: the iTunes team thinks that QuickTime was a good inspiration for a UI.

The Interface Hall of Shame: QuickTime 4.0 Player

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

Apple's long romance with skeuomorphism peaked with Bob Bishop's APPLE-VISION, and went downhill from there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-cyU

Oh god all these bad memories coming back. I remember sticking with MoviePlayer 2.5 for many many years. And to think I even stuck with QuickTime Player 7 pretty much until this year because that was still better than the new version.

What is it about media player software in particular where everyone from the beginning had to have weird skeuomorphic UIs? Even the early examples I can think of (AppleCD Player, Creative's Windows 3.1 stuff, Winamp) all had to have non-native UIs. Preferably with a fake segmented VFD/LED display https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-images/popup-appl... http://i.imgur.com/27tgh8S.png

edit: that Apple Vision demo is gorgeous! (hah)

I have two 27" Apple monitors, one in portrait and one in landscape orientation. The portrait orientation monitor I use for code. They look identical, there is no degradation (that I can see) from looking at the monitor rotated 90°.

If anyone is interested, I use the VESA mount conversion kit from Apple and have the monitors mounted on the Amazon Basics monitor arms, which I highly recommend.

I like portrait mode too, so much in fact that I've got 2 x Dell 27" U2715H monitors (2560x1440 eIPS) set up that way.

I've been using this setup for about 18 months now, and I really rate it. 1440x2560 is a very usable resolution. Very few problems with websites (I had regular minor issues when I had a 1200x1920 screen); tons of lines of code on screen; plenty wide enough for 2 side-by-side columns; I don't find it a problem to use 3 side-by-side columns (77 columns apiece) in Emacs with a small font; small desk footprint.

Full-height windows are sometimes a bit much, but for the main display I've found having one window or panel that's 2/3 the height and one that's 1/3 the height works very well. The 1/3 height area is still 1440x850 or so - plenty for a terminal, Emacs window, debugger output, that kind of thing.

As a bonus, 1/3 of the screen is a bit taller than 16:9, so good for videos, and 2/3 of the screen is about the right proportions for A4 PDFs. Considering it's just the not-very-good 16:9 turned on its side, I've found 9:16 to work remarkably well...

(With the proviso that the pixel count is almost certainly relevant, and I very likely would not feel as positive about 1080x1920...)

Why are desktop screens seemingly locked at ~100 DPI? I recently got a Chromebook with 157 DPI and it looks so much better.

Everyone on the teams at my last 3 jobs has preferred a single large 4k display to alternatives. The ability to have 3-4 columns of code, as well as more lines of code per column, has been invaluable for productivity.

It is very often that I find myself debugging or reading code for the first time and need to dive into several layers of code. Having it all side by side helps tremendously.

YMMV

The other nice thing about a single, large monitor is that it maps to the same workflow / muscle memory you'd use on your laptop.

Switching between a laptop and multi-monitor setup was a bit comical for me despite trying it for a month. Even something as simple as alt-tab focusing a window that's not on the expected screen would slow me down.

It wasn't for me. And my productivity improved once I moved back to a single 26in monitor.

Around my office, we have two common setups. A large 30" display (16:10), or a super-wide curved display.

The super-wide is way too short, vertically, that I have no interest in using one.

I actually have two of those 30" displays on my desk. My approach is do to most of my work on the primary, and to shove some chat windows, log windows, etc, to the secondary. So I'm really using all of one display, and maybe half of the other. (Of course once displays get this big, the other half of the secondary display is too far from my field of view anyways.)

I now prefer UWQHD to my 4k monitor. It's like having two screens side by side without a seam.

"It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too."

Actually, it's quite simple - here is a 27" 1920x1920 square monitor you can buy on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/FlexScan-EV2730QFX-Monitor-1920x1920-...

I have one and I think it's great. I actually prefer splitting a 16x10 monitor into two halves, but the perfectly square monitor is great for diagnostics/monitoring where I can split it into four equally sized quadrants and see four things at once...

I second this. I have this EIZO square monitor and it is a joy to work in. Just think of "wide" screens as actually being "short" screens, and you can see why you'd feel cramped and constricted when using one, like living in a house with 7-foot ceilings.

Short screens! Exactly. I'm going to start using that one.

While impressed with the existence of this, it's still difficult to remove an arm and leg to pay for this.

At work, my widescreen monitor is perfect for showing two columns of code on the screen.

That may be a reflection on the cleanliness of our codebase though...

Are you using an IDE that has sidebars or other elements on the screen than code?

In my setup with Emacs, a 1600x1200 screen and 12px monospaced font, I have two 86 character wide windows side by side. To add another column without changing something else, I would need a 2400px wide screen.

I wouldn't object to a large 2:1 aspect screen on my desktop, but it makes for an unwieldy shape for a laptop.

I meant the inverse, our lines are so long that I need a widescreen monitor.

I'm not at work right now, but from memory I get around 120 characters in each column without any sidebars.

The “certain angle” applies mostly to TN monitors. VA monitors are much better at this, and IPS monitors can be viewed from almost any angly (the specs say 178° or something like that). IPS monitors are often more expensive, but I’m willing to pay.

You still run into problems with the pixel structure. The RGB components are lined up horizontally, and they become vertical when turned 90 degrees. Any tech that takes advantage of the layout, such as Microsoft's Cleartype, will fail miserably on a rotated display. I suppose that's why Apple thought it was so important to go to high DPI displays on the iPhone and iPad.

Cleartype accounts for monitor rotation (although admittedly, only as long as all your monitors are rotated the same way).

The trade-off is that now we have more vertical pixels than ever before (4k monitors). It just comes with extra bonus pixels on the sides too. What I do is have a code window on one side, and a documentation window on the other.

Yeah, now. Thanks to Apple's start of the high DPI push and 4k/5k displays.

For a long time, we suffered from what I'll call "The Great Laptop Display Regression of 2008". For many years, you simply could NOT buy a non-Apple laptop with more than 1080 pixels in the vertical direction. It didn't matter how big of a screen you got, and it didn't matter how much you were willing to pay for it. No one dared even give you the option.

This.

I still have what I believe is one of the last great laptops with a 1920x1200 display. It's a 15 inch Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell with gigabit Ethernet from around 2008-2009. It's not my primary driver. It's used as a Plex Server running Windows 10.

I'll occasionally use it for browsing when I am working from home using my work laptop on the VPN.

I usually have a two monitor setup, but my next personal computer will be a 27 inch 5K iMac. I want to be able to use one monitor with an IDE on one half and the browser on the other half.

For a while it was nearly impossible to find a reasonably priced laptop with anything other than 1366x768.

Any modern (ie IPS) screen has a viewing angle wide enough for vertical to look perfectly fine. Wide screen plus a tiling window manager will change your life. Going back to the days of 4:3 sounds awful.

My issue with a laptop is that for the screen to have a wider aspect ratio, the whole computer has to be bigger, or the screen has to be shorter. With a desktop, it's much easier to have multiple displays or very large displays and the aspect ratio is less important.

Every time I consider upgrading my home desktop monitor, I consider how difficult and/or expensive it will be to replicate its 16:10 aspect ratio. That immediately cures me of the upgrade fever.

For me, desktop 21:9 displays have been a good substitute -- divide the screen down the middle and it's comparable in feel to having side-by-side 4:3 displays.

I have one on my house computer. Really nice, but I found that for doing productive stuff, having two screens (16:9 + 4:3 or 16:9 + 16:9) it's better. Yes, you can use the 21:9 as virtually two 4:3 screens, but it's the same. They way that you have tendency to place and snap windows isn't the same that when you have a true multi monitor setup.

My desktop runs a pair of stacked 21:9 displays just fine ;-)

I'm in the camp that finds 16:9 / 16:10 to be the wrong ratio for... everything. Maybe a giant high-DPI display would make it better. For now, having four windows arranged as though they were maximized on a 2x2 grid of 4:3-ish displays perfect suits how I like to work.

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