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Comment by bluekeybox | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a programmer, I don't need horizontal space, but vertical space

Mostly agree, but my opinion on this matter was somewhat swayed after I started using :vsp in Vim on my 13" widescreen notebook (combined with a full-screen mode in iTerm). Not only had splitting the screen vertically right in the middle helped me recover the "lost" space, but it also forced me to wrap my code consistently to 80 characters, so now it looks/prints better. I guess the moral is that sometimes a bad thing can lead to something good.

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On my 1920x1080 laptop screen, I can comfortably fit 3 emacs sessions side by side, all windows on the same process, all frequently further split one level horizontally. This is a lot of code. I generally only use 2 and have a shell on the left, which also comfortably fits, but if I need 3 I have it.

(I would generally consider the need to have 6 views of your source to get your job done a code smell, but it isn't always my code, and lately we've been doing some client/message-bus/server code where 6 starts to feel a bit constraining.)

Technically I'm still neutral on the emacs v. vim wars and they're both good editors. But looking around me, the vim users in my office really need to get better about buffer management. I'm sure vim can technically do everything emacs can do with buffers and splitting and windowing, but "nobody" seems to do it.

Run your shell inside emacs and you get the best of both worlds. I invariably have my third column running two to five terminals.

Ah! Another Emacs user who likes to spread 6 windows across a 1920-wide display. I knew I couldn't be the only one :-)

I use XEmacs with the 6x10 font, and can get three windows across, each 100 characters wide, all in the same frame (it takes a little fiddling to set up, but then I keep the session around a long time).

I use some revive mode code a friend wrote to revive my frame config.

Just like desktop-save, I do C-x S instead, and it saves all open frames, and the buffers they contain (no frame size or position though, afair).

C-x F to load in the rare event I need to restart emacs.

The code is at https://github.com/nunb/revive-mode-config

And when they show up in #vim, we try our best to help them. ;)

The problem with all these horizontal setups is that when looking at a screen for long periods of time, neck cricks are inevitable, and what's worse is that those cricks are just harbingers of future woe.

I strive to stay vertically and horizontally aligned to both my keyboard and my screen.

Even though I have a 1920x1080 monitor, I keep windows stacked in the center, and use multiple emacs frames rather than one frame C-x 3'd into multiple columns.

1440 pixels wide is about what I think is ideal at 1.5 feet of separation.

Same here (but C-x 3 in Emacs) - I am working on some code that mixes OCaml and C and it's nice to have the corresponding parts side-by side.

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