Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Clearly there's a market for S-shaped monitors. You get the benefits of two landscape sections, two portrait sections, a central 45d section, and two small 45d sections, useful for putting notifications in.

Kidding aside, I just have 2 gaming monitors on either side of my MBP, in landscape. A screen for monitoring prod, a comms screen, and a code screen. When needed I slide out a coding window to another monitor.

I also use the extra desktops for my calendar and my task list. Three-fingers slide one way to see my calendar in maximized Safari, the other way to look at tasks in maximized Trello.

About vertical coding, I tend to think that if you need to go vertical to understand the code, it's already too long. Note I don't mean it must fit in landscape, I'm saying if it doesn't AND you need to see it in vertical for it to make sense, that's a smell. YMMV.

My setup in the office is a screen dedicated to Outlook, a screen for my code, and a screen for documentation and chat.

I know some people in the office who made one or both of the side screens vertical, but that doesn't work for me. Vertical means I'm tilting my head or my eyes up and down which doesn't feel great. Also horizontal side monitors are in my peripheral vision, vertical side monitors extend too far up to be in my peripheral vision.

I wouldn't want my center monitor to be vertical because then I couldn't easily put code side-by-side. I'd need to take over one of the side monitors which then would mean looking between them requires looking off-center and with a gap from the bezels.

I miss that.

When I was at work, I had a trio of old 20" (1680 x 1050, IIRC) screens. They were 2005FPW Dells that had a—for the time—beautiful IPS display. I got them used for around $80 apiece. Email on the left, documentation and browsing on the right, and code or database windows in the center.

Now in my home office it's a pair of 24" 1920x1200 displays. They're great, but I miss the centered "main" screen, and the larger sizes are wasted on the peripheries anyway.

I'm plotting my first ever switch to a tiling window manager (in my life!) to make use of my excessively large new screen.

I switched to an ultra wide for the same reason and haven’t looked back. With the right windowing software and Mac desktop, it is the best of both worlds depending on what I want (centered ide, centered terminal with multiple tabs, split browsers, split chat and email etc).

Give it a shot if you can!

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