Hacker News Reader

I use a 42" monitor and it's never worked as well as I wanted it to.

I wanted to have 16 windows open at once so I could see all the spreadsheets, text files, folders, pictures relevant to the legal matters I was working on. The 3840 x 2160 pixels lets me do it, but there are drawbacks and limitations:

1. Only the windows in the center of the screen are easy to perceive. I have to turn my neck or my eyes to bring the other windows into my attention, or sit further away from the whole screen, as if I had a smaller monitor.

2. The Mac menu is all the way up the top left. That makes using any app in any window that isn't top left difficult because I have to keep sending the mouse away long distance.

A friend got something instead which is better: Two very wide and not very tall monitors, which he arranges vertically stacked. What makes this so successful is that each monitor has its own menu.

I wish I could accomplish the same thing by telling OSX to split the screen horizontally across the middle so I had two menu's too.

I'm using a 55" 4k Curved TV (which they've unfortunately stopped selling) and it really helps with the "only the center window is easy to perceive". I'd previously used a small 42" 4K TV that was flat and the only way I could really use the corner "windows" was when I was using it on my standing desk to I could lean left or right.

The other thing that's absolutely essential for using these larger format monitors is window management software and in general a more keyboard/macros focused workflow.

> The other thing that's absolutely essential for using these larger format monitors is window management software and in general a more keyboard/macros focused workflow.

I've also found a few tweaks to make it much easier with clicking on tiny things far away with the mouse.

The AltDrag[0] software on windows is godsend. Instead of trying to click menu bars, window edge, or other small targets, you just click anywhere on the window while holding alt. It's built into many linux DEs, but I'm glad to have it on windows too.

Windows also has a (slightly odd) focus-follows-mouse setting built in. This is nice to have less random clicking on windows to bring to the foreground, but has a second, handier function. When you alt-tab to a window with it enabled, it also brings your cursor too the window. Means you never lose your cursor at the wrong end of the monitor(s) switching between windows.

The last trick is probably the simplest, but makes the biggest improvement. I always set my cursor size to be very big so I can see it in my periphery.

Any specific changes you've found useful with your setup? [0] https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

I really found Divvy for Window Management to be great. A lot of the other window managers seemed really fixed in what they could set where Divvy let you build your own grid and boxes.

https://mizage.com/divvy/

I want to emphasize the other comment:

> The other thing that's absolutely essential for using these larger format monitors is window management software and in general a more keyboard/macros focused workflow.

My 4k 39" screen really, really drove me to use keyboard shortcuts. By default on Windows, hitting Windows+Number will take you to the 1st/2nd/3rd/etc program in your taskbar. I use AutoHotKey to take this further: CapsLock+Number and CapsLock+F1-F12 also take me to predetermined programs. I install websites as Chrome apps (chrome://apps/) in order to make going to Gmail/Calendar/Github faster. (I use 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to hide the labels so they don't take over my taskbar.) I also use this script: https://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/79338-simple-window-p... which makes window management (resizing, centering, moving, etc) much easier. I also use Vimium and this program https://github.com/zsims/hunt-and-peck - now my hands almost never leave the keyboard.

I encourage you to spend some time optimizing your setup. It really, really pays off. The powerboard on my TV-monitor has broken 3x now - and each time I've repaired it/replaced the part because I like my setup so much.

> The Mac menu is all the way up the top left. That makes using any app in any window that isn't top left difficult because I have to keep sending the mouse away long distance.

You might want to check out Menuwhere:

https://manytricks.com/menuwhere/

I started using it after deciding to minimalize my desktop and hide my menu bar by default and put my dock on the right, since the monitor is wider than it is tall.

I'm using a 43" LG monitor and it works pretty well, though I do find that something in-between 28" and 43" would have been better, but most of the wider ones are ultrawide rather than 16:9. I also have a 28" 4k and it's weird that using the middle 28" of the 43" in 2560x1440 with huge black matte feels so much more spacious.

For pairing it's hard to find the right window/font size as it's typically displays as 27" for the other person. Zoom/meet's are pretty good though, can clearly see faces and what's presented.

I've wanted to do a similar thing, but I wonder: don't you end up sitting too far from the screen, so that the perceived text size is smaller than on the regular 24" screens?

I have a 32" screen and if I sit as close to it as a 24", the sides don't look so great any more because of the angle. So I have to push it back, but then I have to increase the text. While with two screens, you can set the second one at an angle, which alleviates this problem. I expect the curved screens to do the same, though I've never tried one.

> do black-and-white code editing

You've piqued my curiosity. No syntax highlighting?

I’ve experimented with this a few times. I find at least some degree of color and style differentiation helps (e.g., comments, string constants). For this I liked the Tao themes for emacs. It was completely fine. I moved back to various color themes just as a change of pace, like changing the wallpaper.

I guess yes I do, although I've never really been that bothered by syntax highlighting, so I don't use it as much as most. When I do use it, it'll be subtle e.g. change from black to dark blue, or similar. But I also do a lot of my work in the shell, and while I like colour in things like a git diff, I don't care either way for syntax highlighting in code other than liking a grey for comments so it doesn't draw my attention away from the code.

However, actually I guess even syntax highlighting doesn't make too much difference if your background colour is black or white, because that still works well for mapping into YUV where the chrominance can be whatever the syntax highlighting is using and the background is either full brightness (white) or no brightness (black). Even black on white with red underlining can be done with the same chrominance.

The real problem, and what I really meant, is when you have things with e.g. red text on a green background, which just turns into an illegible mess when using YUV 420 (also my bad, the monitor actually does 420 not 422) because the chrominance is different, but the intensity is approximately equal.

So, for almost everything it works well. Youtube videos, code editing, text editing, etc. are all fine, but for some pathological use cases it looks terrible.

I've been using a 43" 4k curved tv for a while, and I love it. The biggest problem is that it's driven at 30Hz, but as I use it only for coding I don't care much.

Does the tv not support 60hz, or have you just not found the correct display adapter setup?

I think it doesn't support more than HDMI 1.4, which means 30Hz @ 4k.

What I found is that the TVs support HDMI 2.0, but at least a few years ago even the high-end graphics cards only did HDMI 1.4, and so couldn't drive at both 4K and 60Hz, even though they were able to support the same over DisplayPort. Fortunately, dongles are relatively cheap, so this shouldn't be an issue.

The problem I had using such a dongle is that there seemed to be bugs in the Radeon driver, unrelated to the graphics mode, where it wouldn't always redraw the contents of some windows, and if you dragged the window around, the left-over garbage was moved around. And for some reason, these problems didn't affect either 4K at 30Hz or 1080p at 60Hz. In the end, I just switched to nVidia and put up with possible YUV fringing effects instead. I'm sure in the maybe 5 years since then, that the bug has been fixed now.

Aren't TVs too glossy to be used as monitors?