Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor • Hacker News Board

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#151

Post by mrob » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

There's little need for multiple monitors if you can switch virtual desktops very easily and quickly. The best method I've found is using a switcher control in the corner of the screen that can be operated by the mouse wheel.

The corners of the screen are the easiest targets to hit because they have effectively infinite size (see Fitts's Law). The mouse wheel is the best input to use because the mouse wheel is always non-destructive in standard desktop GUI software (equivalent to HTTP GET, not HTTP PUT). So long as your switcher control does not wrap around, you can set your two most important desktops as the first and last desktops, and access them with no conscious thought by jerking your arm and blindly scrolling the mouse wheel.

I use a patched version of lxqt-panel for this. The official version wraps around while switching desktops with the mouse wheel. This is IMO a bad idea because you always have the option of clicking the numbers directly, so it doesn't save any time. I have all animations disabled (essential for this system to be tolerable). I use three virtual desktops, with the the middle one reserved for less important tasks. The middle one requires conscious thought to access because I have to scroll the mouse wheel more carefully. But when accessing the main two I scroll the mouse wheel fast enough that I don't notice it.

Theoretically it would be possible to have unconscious access to 8 desktops this way (mouse wheel up and mouse wheel down for all 4 corners) but I haven't implemented this because I'm happy with two.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#152

Post by jrm4 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

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…

Great example of "what works for you" I think - I'm in the camp of:

I did multiple monitors for a long time, and probably my best productivity thing was switching to one AND ONLY ONE big enough 4k. Basically allows me to switch between "one focused monitor most of the time" and "the equivalent of 2 or 3, maybe even 4" if I need it.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#153

Post by necovek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #110

ActorNightly wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

M1 non-Pro could only support one external screen through TB, and I think it carried on through at least M2 Air. It would also frequently get my Dell screen into a weird hung state after suspending and attempting to reconnect, frequently requiring a power cycle of the screen (not even connecting a Linux laptop back to it got it fixed). At some point, it seems to have gotten fixed and I am not seeing it anymore.

Linux, however, has worked great ever since I got the USB-C DP Alt-mode screen back around 8 years ago with my Thinkpad X1 Carbons over the years. I do have trouble getting a stable 8K at 60Hz through it with Iris Xe (gen13), but that does not work with Macs either.

Linux did have issues with using different scaling factors on multiple connected screens, but I only ever used one monitor so it never bothered me.

On top of that, it still does support subpixel rendering, and you can even tune pixel layout (RGB, BGR...) for VA and OLED panels, so text never looks crappy or janky as it can on Macs with low DPI screens (eg. large 4k screens of 40"+, but noticeable even on 32" 4k).

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#154

Post by mrob » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

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…

1080p is plenty for text-based work if you're not using Chinese or Japanese. It looks as sharp as 4K when you disable text anti-aliasing.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#155

Post by necovek » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #114

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…

“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.” counterpoint: this doesn’t appear the case with Apple, as they have defaulted their OS entirely to retina-level density now, removed subpixel rendering, and anything non-5K may look off (and you need to go through hoops to make it look well). As such, I’m typing this in a…

Subpixel rendering has nothing to do with any of this: it was messing up on non-RGB pixel layout panels like VA and OLED, and it used to be a simple setting in GNOME (hidden these days unfortunately).

Still, even 5K at 27" is not without noticeable jagged edges in diagonal lines and textual characters (though I've only tried 4K at 24", but that's a similar DPI and angular resolution if at the same distance) if your visual acuity (with or without correction) is around 20/20 or better (mine is better with glasses/contacts).

I hate how the text looks with a Mac on a 4K 32" screen, let alone 4K 42" screen.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#156

Post by Tade0 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

wateralien wrote: post #148

Read this on my third screen while waiting for 4 Claude sessions to finish.

Ah, the defocuser 3000.

I can't stay "in the zone" while waiting for Claude. On the other hand whenever I'm blocked on something, I just ask it and get my answer way earlier than I would if I used a search engine.

It's quite the dilemma.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#157

Post by NikolaNovak » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #87

NikolaNovak wrote: post #3

Like everything else in life, it depends : * I feel the key message here is "single vs multiple windows", not small vs big monitor. I love my 32" curved monitor. I too switched from having three monitors to having just one big monitor and staying with one maximizing window majority of time. It's also role dependant. I spent few years as ops manager and multiple windows and situational awareness / task parallelization…

An aside: I am generally good at keeping notes while in a meeting, and I have tried shared notes in One Note, but as soon as someone else edits something in the same spot, it creates a forked history requiring manual reconciliation: does this work for you? I've switched to Word akin to how I used to do it with Google Docs as that works much better. Perhaps it's given away by "One" in the name (one simultaneous editor…

I use onenote as a personal note taking system.

For shared artifacts we use word, excel or PowerPoint in corporate onedrive and it works shockingly well, with minor but important caveats - you can't usually edit the same exact box at the same time, and it can get confused with offline changes by multiple people. But online changes by multiple simultaneous people seems to work really well. I especially enjoy when one person is presenting slides, an executive makes a suggestion, and another team member makes the change real time on the same deck and it shows up in presentation.

We are just starting to experiment with some shared onenote notebooks, it seems to have a bit more learning curve and needs more discipline and structure than the rest of ms office.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#158

Post by SteveStavros » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

Went the opposite direction for a while, two monitors, then came back to one. The context switching between screens was costing more than the extra screen real estate was giving. Single monitor forces you to be more deliberate about what deserves your attention right now.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#159

Post by doubled112 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #144

znpy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to post something very similar: the degree of benefit you get from having multiple displays depends a lot on the amount of multi-tasking that you have. If you can focus most of your time on a single window then a single monitor is just fine. But when you have to reason across multiple windows very very often then multiple displays help a lot. For me it’s a bit messy: i am a cloud engineer and the kind of…

Similar job. My solution was a single 4k monitor and Stage Manager. I can tile viewing a log and having a terminal open, and then just pop back to a browser when I need to. Plus, terminal can have tabs. When monitors were 1024 by 768, I needed more than one monitor. Now that everything is designed to be one’s only window at 1920 by 1080, I need a 4k monitor. I imagine that when 4k becomes the default, I will need a 1…

I am somewhat surprised by how long 1080p being the standard has stuck.

People often seem shocked that I use mostly 4K screens, but I've had one of them for almost 10 years now.

It also seems that 8K has died for now. I think we still have time.

Re: Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor

#160

Post by jebarker » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 3:42 PM UTC

I find it useful to have multiple monitors or a large monitor that can support multiple windows comfortably useful for development, e.g. multi-pane IDE, terminals, documentation all visible simultaneously. The distraction problem is that everything else (slack, email, internet) is just a click away. I wonder if the answer is to treat the computer desktop like a real desktop that only supports having the materials open for one task at a time. So consciously switch tasks by putting the old things away and getting out the new things.

Maybe the fact that slack and outlook take a painful amount of time to open is a feature not a bug