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Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

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Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#101

Post by lloeki »

asdff wrote: post #57
kartoffelsaft wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiling merely changes the idiosyncrasies, and I say this as someone who primarily uses them. (hyprland in my case) If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and…

This is why I use no window management. Windows are arbitrary sizes of what I happened to drag out last time. Windows piled on top of eachother. Some stuff in the back of the pile dates back weeks. A couple other piles of various windows in other desktop spaces. I like to think it is like a messy desk. Maybe closer to how we think in real life. Like you the tiling was a lot of faff. What goes where, how big shoudl th…

The word you're looking for is "spatial interface".

http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#102

Post by sassymuffinz »

bob1029 wrote: post #97

My productivity skyrocketed when I reduced my monitor count from 3 to 1. I tried the big chonkers, but the humble 27" 1440p is unbeatable for me. I'm not being paid enough money to worry about that many pixels.

I recently got rid of my 27in vertical monitor that I had been using for years. I found I was getting really stressed lately and feeling closed in at my desk. Getting rid of it has improved my mental health at work, no idea why it suddenly became an issue the last year as I used to have 3 when I was a twenty something.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#103

Post by ehnto »

I switched from dual monitor to single monitors with a tiling window manager. Same reason, I "flip" context far less and am less distracted. Even though there can be multiple programs on my screen at once, they are all relevant to the current tasks context so I find if I do get distracted by one, it's not like getting distracted from the whole context.

Previously I would be "alt-tabbing" and constantly losing focus. Like stepping through a doorway and forgetting why you came into that room.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#104

Post by Faaak »

cookiengineer wrote: post #90
JSR_FDED wrote: post #89

I spent decades completely happy with Cmd+Tab. Now I’m helping someone develop a trading system and I need to see several log files simultaneously, a broker GUI, and neovim. Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level. FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, bu…

The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc. I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a mal…

In sway + Wayland, these UI scaling bugs are fixed

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#105

Post by eemil »

daniel-ash wrote: post #45

I love alt+tab way too much to ever go back to multi screen. A different angle: multiple screens can cause neck problems if you’re tilting your head in a weird direction for too long

Same here, I've found a single (not too big) monitor to be best for ergonomics.

Still keep a second monitor around, but it's exclusively for screen sharing. Speaking of, having a dedicated monitor for sharing is really nice:

- It can have a standard resolution and aspect ratio (1080p) which is perfect for sharing

- It is a clean slate. I only share stuff I consciously move to that monitor. No need to clear my screen or burden my colleagues with unrelated windows in our call.

- Yes app sharing exists, but screen sharing is just more reliable and works better for sharing multiple things sequentially/simultaneously.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#106

Post by yzydserd »

justonceokay wrote: post #77
riidom wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single-screen user here. I like virtual desktops in addition to alt-tabbing.

I’m an adamant single-screen alt-tabber. I hardly ever even have two windows open side-by-side. I’ve always felt that I can alt-tab 2-3 times per second and that it’s faster to not move my eyes. Why look at docs next to code when I can only read one at a time anyway? It’s also embedded in my muscle memory to switch to specific apps by Apple-space typing 2-3 characters. So Firefox is “Apple-space-fi”. It’s so fast I f…

Same here. Single screen, single app, at least 95% of the time. For decades.

I’d like to try a squarish monitor, but it seems to be a barren wasteland of choice: mateview, dualup, or flexscan. Meh.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#107

Post by cookiengineer »

Faaak wrote: post #104
cookiengineer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc. I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a mal…

In sway + Wayland, these UI scaling bugs are fixed

... while other bugs are introduced :-/

Can't switch because of old hardware and vulkan/mesa legacy reasons.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#108

Post by ahartmetz »

Faaak wrote: post #104
cookiengineer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc. I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a mal…

In sway + Wayland, these UI scaling bugs are fixed

KDE + Wayland is fine, too... except in some Java apps and LibreOffice with its ancient crap toolkit.

Firefox, MS Edge (my MS Teams sandbox) and any GTK apps do work.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#109

Post by skyyler »

Faaak wrote: post #104
cookiengineer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc. I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a mal…

In sway + Wayland, these UI scaling bugs are fixed

Yeah, I don't have UI scaling bugs with Niri + Wayland.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#110

Post by microtonal »

ActorNightly wrote: post #92
JSR_FDED wrote: post #89

I spent decades completely happy with Cmd+Tab. Now I’m helping someone develop a trading system and I need to see several log files simultaneously, a broker GUI, and neovim. Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level. FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, bu…

>but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly. LOL Im currently typing this on a work issued Macbook thats about 2 years old at this point, and 40% of the time, when I plug in a cable, it decides it wants to turn on and turn off hdmi output in rapid succession.

I always use DisplayPort over USB-C DP-Alt (or Thunderbolt on some displays) and I literally never have a problem across various LG, Dell and Apple Studio Displays.

MacBook Pro M1 Pro or MacBook Pro M5

Sounds like something is really broken in your setup?

On the other hand, sleeping/waking Thunderbolt displays on my ThinkPad with Linux regularly leads to kernel panics, across several kernel versions.

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