Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said, it has more to do with your working memory than with speed or ease of navigation. If you are viewing more code at once (which a larger screen allows you to do) then you can be more productive at certain tasks. I find that large architectural changes, performance profiling, and complex debugging are particular scenarios that lend themselves well to a large screen. This is the point I was making to which you…
To your repeated point: It's been my experience that better knowing what the code is doing leads to improving it. I am not a smart or clever person. I can only see one focal point at a time. But with enough time (and a trivial screen resolution) I feel that I can understand and improve on something as complex as the operating system running my computer, which is some very big software with parts of it (big and small)…
Here is the example I am dealing with right now. I have spent the last few months designing and implementing a complex system. It consists of hundreds of components and tens of thousands of lines of code. This project is reasonably small and I can keep most of the mental model "in my head" at once. So it's appropriate to edit on my laptop screen — or any screen. I can usually think of which symbol I need to jump to and within seconds I can be positioned in the editor, at that symbol.
Today I have had to take that component and push it into the rest of the system, which is hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it is a codebase that I have created over three years. I can't keep this all in my head, and this is where having a large screen produces noticeable productivity improvements and speed improvements to problem solving.
It is not a matter of not being able to jump around the code instantly from my keyboard — I can do that easily. It is knowing and remembering where to go and what I'm supposed to be working on. It is trying to maintain context while handling the many hundreds of errors that come about due to the necessary integration, API and architectural changes.
When I have a large screen I can afford to maintain a long list of files in a column on the left, I can see more large files at once. This allows me to constantly refresh my memory. I can glance at the data in front of me to determine what symbol I need to jump to next. I often mentally blank out when dealing with this level of scale — that "what was I about to edit?" feeling. When I am only on my laptop screen I have to start pulling up code, tracing a path back through it to redevelop context. When I have a large screen I can (usually) rebuild this context by glancing at the existing information.
(Note that this is not a messy project, I have spent a long time and given very careful thought to its design. It is just large and necessarily complex because of what it has to do. A bigger screen makes it faster to develop large scale interactions in such a project.)
> Was that necessary?
I'm sorry about that. It wasn't.
> What's even better about the command line is that you can pipe input and output between applications.
I have nothing against the command line — I use it all the time. I just like to take the most efficient path when working and sometimes that is not the command line. But that is tangential to the large screen point above.
> I do. I lack the sensory to monitor more than a couple metrics at once. I prefer profiling data that can be captured and analyzed later.
I had meant to ask if you analyse your profiling data on the command line. Do you?