Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

sprocketfox.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 426 posts

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#291

Post by function_seven »

ziml77 wrote: post #248
lordnacho wrote: post #109

Clearly there's a market for S-shaped monitors. You get the benefits of two landscape sections, two portrait sections, a central 45d section, and two small 45d sections, useful for putting notifications in. Kidding aside, I just have 2 gaming monitors on either side of my MBP, in landscape. A screen for monitoring prod, a comms screen, and a code screen. When needed I slide out a coding window to another monitor. I a…

My setup in the office is a screen dedicated to Outlook, a screen for my code, and a screen for documentation and chat. I know some people in the office who made one or both of the side screens vertical, but that doesn't work for me. Vertical means I'm tilting my head or my eyes up and down which doesn't feel great. Also horizontal side monitors are in my peripheral vision, vertical side monitors extend too far up to…

I miss that.

When I was at work, I had a trio of old 20" (1680 x 1050, IIRC) screens. They were 2005FPW Dells that had a—for the time—beautiful IPS display. I got them used for around $80 apiece. Email on the left, documentation and browsing on the right, and code or database windows in the center.

Now in my home office it's a pair of 24" 1920x1200 displays. They're great, but I miss the centered "main" screen, and the larger sizes are wasted on the peripheries anyway.

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#292

Post by Terry_Roll »

andyjpb wrote: post #202
jbverschoor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have 2 pcs, connected over synergy, for the same reason. The best part is that your cmd-tab / application switcher is local to that screen. Still looking for a similar solution on 1 laptop with 2 screens.

I've longed for a window manager that can assign different virtual desktops to different screens. Of course, there are compositing, scaling and resolution issues to overcome, but it'd be really neat to have a palette of virtual desktops that could be called up on whichever monitor was most convenient. ...and it'd make screen mirroring during presentations a breeze!

If using windows, Ultramon works very well,

It also works well within virtual pc's and licensing is per machine so you can use it on multiple virtual pc's at the same time as the main host, so you can multiple virtual pc's running, subject to hw abilities, and it works instantly and seemlessly, also high customisable and you can do your own commands to work with things like nVidia's mosaic.

https://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

If you have the professional line of nVidia graphics cards aka Quadro, nVidia do a command line tool for configuring a multi monitoring system upto 16 4K monitors, so you can do things like tv walls or special effects in a theme park, or just fancy desktop setups for city traders or coders. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/solutions/... https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/mosaic-utility/

I cant remember if it also does tilting like that described in this post or not, but you can certainly do a lot with mosaic run it all from shortcuts so you can instantly switch to different resolutions and layouts and the shortcuts can be used in Ultramon, for seamless operations, ie switch between 2 physical monitors and 3 monitors, all called from within ultramon. Ultramon then detects the physical monitor changes and acts accordingly.

If you are looking for a nice 3 monitor setup, I can recommended this, the Ergotron HX triple box with the HX desk mounted floating arm. https://www.ergotron.com/en-gb/products/product-details/98-0... https://www.ergotron.com/en-gb/products/product-details/45-4...

You can spend hours in front of one these, get perfectly comfortable without taking up your desk space as it clamps to the back of your desk, and when you have to do paperwork, you can push the monitors to the back of the desk.

However this gaming chair manufacturer has caught my eye, like this one, https://allimperatorworks.com/scorpion-gaming-chair-setup/

but if they ever added some batteries and motors so it can drive around, I'd get one of these for my mobile solution as it can still do 3 monitors. :-) https://allimperatorworks.com/product/iw-j20-pro/

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#293

Post by aasasd »

nimbius wrote: post #107

fools begone. The ideal monitor rotation --the one that secures the most favour on HN-- is a slow 1-2 centimetre per second continuous orbit about the office in 2 dimensions on a tracked rail. This in turn ensures that one may not only glorify their monitors rotation, but also glorify their practice of standing whilst working instead of sitting. The movement --which rotates as well amongst its own Z axis-- also promo…

I'm upvoting this solely for the reason that I want more comments on HN similarly deliver aesthetic pleasure.

(Also let me guess, one of your favorite authors is called DFW.)

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#294

Post by danvillalon »

convery wrote: post #272
kbenson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I ran multiple monitors I often designated one as my "communication" display, which got email/chat on it, and probably browser as well (for reference material), while the other was the active work one with the current task (usually a few terminals). I found the clearly defines areas for specific tasks was useful. Now I work off a 40" 4k TV without magnification (I'm close to it), and I try to do similar but it's…

Can recommend Nvidias nView software for partitioning the screen into work-areas. Then maximizing, by default dragging the window to a border of a work-area, but is programmable so you can select a default area, just fills the area. Only downside is that you need to patch a JNZ in their DLL where they check if you have a Quadro card and quit.

Windows has PowerToys [1] with the tool FancyZones, I've used it daily for a while and in general works pretty well, it's customizable and I use it to setup "zones" for working and splitting my tools into predefined spaces on muy screens.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#295

Post by MarkLowenstein »

wruza wrote: post #200
MarkLowenstein wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got one. 100% recommended. Bought mine at $1500. I'm not rich but I've never regretted this purchase.

Have you considered buying an nvidia card and 4k monitor of the same height (or width) and setting square resolution + cropping one/both edges?

No, I didn't think of that. It would give the same effect (after all 1920x1920 isn't that high a res). But on the other hand, could I resist using the other pixels I paid for?...tough choice.

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#296

Post by nick__m »

klyrs wrote: post #165
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Would you mind sharing the make and model, though?

Dell S3221QS This is not an endorsement. I've got some issues with the monitor -- it does something weird displaying certain patterns, which comes up for me occasionally. Also, sometimes, the curved screen bugs me, because straight lines aren't straight. YMMV

It's quite decent, I use that when I work at the office, it can be bought for 550$cad if you wait for a sales.

When I work from home I use a Samsung 49" ultrawide (5120x1440p@120Hz). Moving the taskbar vertically on the left and using Windows FancyZone make that a wonderful and productive experience. My wife says that I appear to work for mission control at NASA with that setup; this make my inner nerd happy!

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#297

Post by zaptheimpaler »

aasasd wrote: post #289
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest pain point with big monitor tiling setups is nested/incompatible windowing/tiling management. for example i often use Pop Shell, VSCode, tmux and firefox. So now I have many different layers of windows - Pop Shell - Desktop/Monitor 1 - Firefox - tab1 - tab2 - Terminal - tmux - pane1 - pane2 - VSCode - tab1 - tab2 - splitleft - splitright - Desktop/Monitor 2 All of these layers are different keybinds and wi…

The thing that you want was around in the 90s already, and it's called multiple windows without tabs.

Yes but unfortunately that doesn't really work for heavy applications today. That would mean like 50 independent memory-hungry firefox or IDE processes corresponding to every tab/file you might have open. The entire point is to decouple a window from the resources/host process that controls the window.

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#298

Post by boring_twenties »

andyjpb wrote: post #202
jbverschoor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have 2 pcs, connected over synergy, for the same reason. The best part is that your cmd-tab / application switcher is local to that screen. Still looking for a similar solution on 1 laptop with 2 screens.

I've longed for a window manager that can assign different virtual desktops to different screens. Of course, there are compositing, scaling and resolution issues to overcome, but it'd be really neat to have a palette of virtual desktops that could be called up on whichever monitor was most convenient. ...and it'd make screen mirroring during presentations a breeze!

That's exactly how xmonad works

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#299

Post by LtdJorge »

thefunnyman wrote: post #283
convery wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can recommend Nvidias nView software for partitioning the screen into work-areas. Then maximizing, by default dragging the window to a border of a work-area, but is programmable so you can select a default area, just fills the area. Only downside is that you need to patch a JNZ in their DLL where they check if you have a Quadro card and quit.

Windows 11 has some nice window management features like this built in, but I’ve found the windows power toys fancy zones to be even better. This works for all graphics cards.

Was gonna recommend PowerToys too, great tools.

Re: Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

#300

Post by aasasd »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #297
aasasd wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that you want was around in the 90s already, and it's called multiple windows without tabs.

Yes but unfortunately that doesn't really work for heavy applications today. That would mean like 50 independent memory-hungry firefox or IDE processes corresponding to every tab/file you might have open. The entire point is to decouple a window from the resources/host process that controls the window.

Why would an IDE have a separate process for another window? At least, Idea does it right (iirc).

As for FF, I have 47 windows opened, but 11 processes running—one of which is a ‘master’ process. Meanwhile tabs that are in one window can still run in multiple processes.

Post reply on HN