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Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

nytimes.com

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Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#41

Post by kuon »

I have my main monitor with my vim editor, one monitor with the terminal (tests, logs, console, debugger...), those two are single windows split in multiple pieces.

On the third monitor I have the actual app running (be iOS simulator, browser window or normal native app, virtual machine, whatever)

And I have a fourth monitor with team chat, documentation, sourcetree and "general browsing".

When I work I just keep my email and other IM closed. Those are distracting in single or multiple monitor mode anyway.

I have two horizontally stacked 27' monitor at the center and 1 vertical 27' monitor on each side. This provides a quite compact work area, at least I can see the whole estate without moving my head too much.

I am now traveling and on a single screen, and I am more distracted that ever, because I cannot keep my work "open" all the time and as soon as I switch to another window, it's full screen and covers everything.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#42

Post by charlesism »

coreymgilmore wrote: post #32

Since this is HN and most people here have written code, I compare multi-monitor setups to a text/code editor with a single panel/pane. You just don't do it! Sublime, N++, Atom, etc. all support multiple panes (split screen). Once you get coding enough you never go back to using a single pane. Same thing with multi-monitor. As long as you are productive (unlike the author), more screen real estate is better (obviousl…

Keep in mind that the author is Farhad "Stop Calling Me a Troll" Manjoo. He's sort of a junior version of John C Dvorak, albeit less experienced and less amusing.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#43

Post by weissometer »

bbarn wrote: post #34

I may be alone, but I'll generally take 2 19" non-widescreen monitors over a single giant monitor any day of the week. There's something (possibly as a minority windows user) that I really like about throwing things from screen to screen. Especially when I have to do the rare front-end tweaks. Some people may be able to spit out perfect CSS without seeing the site they're working on, but I'm 95% a back end dev, so wh…

I'm a mechanical engineer, but I largely feel the same way. I have one higher quality screen in front of me dedicated to Solidworks and a second screen dedicated to everything else; usually a task list/ McMaster-Carr/ Excel and Soundcloud or whatever music and task manager (need to know if Chrome + solidworks are eating ALL of the RAM).

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#44

Post by aftbit »

MichaelGG wrote: post #39

For just writing code, like real algorithmic stuff, I've never been more productive than on my 12" ThinkPad X201. Multi mon is great for many things, but in-the-flow coding doesn't seem to benefit. Unfortunately, Lenovo trashed the ThinkPad line, and I actually hate every minute I'm using my T440p. I'd pay $3000 to get an X201 with updated hardware. Nothing else I've seen comes close to the old X series. It had a ful…

I like my X220 off of ebay. It's a 12" machine, but it's fast enough for me and pretty cheap. The screen isn't great, though...

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#45

Post by MichaelGG »

aftbit wrote: post #44
MichaelGG wrote: post #39

For just writing code, like real algorithmic stuff, I've never been more productive than on my 12" ThinkPad X201. Multi mon is great for many things, but in-the-flow coding doesn't seem to benefit. Unfortunately, Lenovo trashed the ThinkPad line, and I actually hate every minute I'm using my T440p. I'd pay $3000 to get an X201 with updated hardware. Nothing else I've seen comes close to the old X series. It had a ful…

I like my X220 off of ebay. It's a 12" machine, but it's fast enough for me and pretty cheap. The screen isn't great, though...

I held off on the subsequent X series because of the dumb 16:9 screens at low resolution! Less than 800 vertical pixels just doesn't work. Also, after the X201_ they started breaking the keyboard, killing the full-sized legendary boards.

The X240 finally improved the screen a bit, but has totally ruined the pointer input and keyboard. Plus apparently it has a lot of problems, and they crippled the RAM (8GB max, in 2014).

I wish some hardware hacker would find a way to mod these things. I'd pay $400, plus costs, to mod modern ThinkPads to use the old kb and pointer setup. I've lost at least that much in decreased work, frustration (I have a under 20% success trying to right click on the abominable clickpad, and worse for middle click) and literal physical pain.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#46

Post by Flenser »

cthalupa wrote: post #16

Meh. What this article really means is "If you get distracted by things, keeping distractions up on more screens will make you more distracted." I have my laptop screen and 3 extra monitors: 1) Email. I keep my main inbox very filtered - email that shows up there is important and I need to see it and read it asap 2) IRC/OCS. Work communication primarily happens through these, and much of it is important. 3) Browser o…

If you get easily distracted, make what you want to be working on distract you away from unproductive things. E.g. I've made an autohotkey script to bring my IDE to the front when I've finished a build, and command line aliases to trigger desktop notifications when long running operations finish.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#47

Post by Methusalah »

If your primary use for a second display is email, then sure I guess it could just be a distraction. But when you're working with several applications at once to accomplish a single task, multiple monitors are a necessity. If you have ever spend any time at all doing data entry, it's immediately obvious how much more efficient it is.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#48

Post by FiatLuxDave »

While everyone seems to be focusing on the issues of distractions, I have found myself in the habit of using one screen due to a particular testing issue. All of the devs in my group were using two screens, and so were the testers, but the majority of our customers used one screen. Customers would run into issues which the devs wouldn't be able to reproduce. It turned out that the issue was pop-ups ('foo is bar; click ok to continue') which would appear normally if you were running the app in your right-hand screen, but which would appear off-screen to a single-screen user. Being the only single-screen user in the development group enabled me to solve the bug and prevent many future cases of the same bug getting through into production.

Re: Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One

#50

Post by msandford »

coldtea wrote: post #14
msandford wrote: post #2

A news junkie finds out that distracting himself makes him less productive. From this we can conclude that ALL people who have two screens should forget the second one. Right.

Or, with a more charitable and less snarky reading, let's condlude that it's possible that "2 screens can be worse than one". Or maybe that most people are "news junkies" that can benefit from less distractions, whether they believe it applies to them or not.

While I agree that my comment was snarky, the author didn't couch the statements at all.

"Discovering Two Screens Aren't Better Than One"

That makes it sound an awful lot like a fact or a universal law, not someone's personal opinion. When it's clearly one person's opinion.

Just about everyone who needs to "multi-task" by reading documentation and applying that knowledge can and likely will benefit from multiple screens. I wish I had three, really.

That's a huge part of the economy; software, CAD/CAM, basically anything engineering-ish at all.

To suppose that the way that you use a computer is the same as the way everyone uses a computer is rather arrogant, don't you think?

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