Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

My suggestion is to hold off until you can save up and buy one of the suggested displays when it's in your budget.

* The BenQ has a matte finish which effectively blurs everything, e.g. it's like it reduces the resolution by 10-20%. The colors are not accurate to my macbook display, despite trying to color calibrate. The brightness is dimmer as well, or looses contrast if I make it bright. Built-in speakers sound awful and volume cannot be controlled by software. I could go on.

It does for my use case, but obvious your mileage may vary.

>Can I turn of part of the screen, if I actually only need smaller space?

Sort of. The monitor can split into dual source mode that has two 1920 sources side by side. You could potentially turn that on and set one side to an empty source. You can also always use a black desktop if you need the rest of the monitor to be dark to allow you to focus on whatever window you have open.

>Can I position a 1920 default width space right in the middle in front of me without it looking weird (i.e. symmetry of screen hardware borders)?

How do you accomplish this with two monitors currently? You would have to choose between symmetry or having one monitor front and center. The Dell software allows you to customize the drag and drop regions. I use three columns that are the full height of the screen. You could set it up to have a 1920 section in the middle with two 960 columns on each side. You could also setup your physical workspace so one side of the monitor is centered in your vision instead of the center of the monitor. Also I have mine mounted on a monitor arm that allows me to reposition it as needed.

> Are workspaces working correctly (in unix, windows, macos, all of them?)

It works in Windows and that is the only native GUI I use. Everything obviously works fine when in the terminal and I rarely increase the resolution of a VM past 1920. I would frankly be shocked if there wasn't similar software available for Linux and OSX that allowed you to setup customized zones like Dell's software if you need to run one of those natively.

In 2018, as the article says, macOS stopped using subpixel antialiasing across all Macs. On low DPI screens however, the loss of subpixel antialiasing made fonts look blurrier, and look smaller and less dark. This occurs on high DPI screens as well, albeit to a lower degree. To bring low DPI screens up to the same level of "darkness", the behaviour of "Use font smoothing when available" was changed to simply makes fonts bolder. This is a plus for people who have difficulty reading the screen.

Furthermore, the author seems to have an obsession around "pixel-crisp" fonts, during the section about the correct resolution for your display. What macOS does is render at 2x resolution, then scale down the image to the monitor's native resolution. Looking back, this was an amazing choice made by Apple, and has allowed for an amazingly bug-free high DPI experience. Even today, Linux and Windows have serious issues with high DPI. 99% of macOS users don't notice that their desktop is not running at native resolution, nor would they care.

If the author just focused on monitors, this article would be a lot better.

Also, 120Hz might be nice for a desktop, but if you are plugging in a laptop, you will notice your power consumption double. For battery life, choose a 60Hz monitor.

The only good solution today is the iMac 5K. Yes, 5K makes all the difference — it lets me comfortably fit three columns of code instead of two in my full-screen Emacs, and that's a huge improvement.

4K monitors are usable, but annoying, the scaling is just never right and fonts are blurry.

Built-in retina screens on macbooks are great, but they are small. And also, only two columns of code, not three.

One thing I noticed is that as I a) become older, b) work on progressively more complex software, I do need to hold more information on my screen(s). Those three columns of code? I often wish for four: ClojureScript code on the frontend, API event processing, domain code, database code. Being older does matter, too, because short-term memory becomes worse and it's better to have things on screen at the same time rather than switch contexts. I'm having hopes for 6K and 8K monitors, once they cost less than an arm and a leg.

So no, I don't think you can develop using "tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays". At least not all kinds of software, and not everyone can.