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Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably something to do with the fact that macOS has handled high-dpi perfectly since 2012 and Windows is still struggling.

Windows has great High DPI support. It's Windows applications that often haven't seen upgrades since before even 2012. Windows' commitment to backward compatibility is the struggle. Windows hasn't had the option to just change processor architectures every dozen years on a seeming whim and subsequently force all software to be rewritten or die.

Mac apps didn't have to be upgraded to work with high dpi.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#472
post #76

The technical details are all right (or seem right to me, anyway), but this is too opinionated for my liking. No, you do not need a 4K monitor for software development. Some people might like them, some won't. [edit/clarification: someone rightfully pointed out that nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor. I was unclear here: I meant "some people won't need them" more than "dislike them"] This sounds like when Jeff…

> nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor In addition to what thomaslord said [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554382 ], 4K monitors tend to be widescreen. 1280x1024 user here; you'll take my aspect ratio when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

What if I gave you more vertical pixels? Would that be okay? 1280x1440 maybe? Just a few more.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is biased because of ligatures. These special glyphs are a little more dense than normal text, e.g the triple line equals and need a higher res display to look good. I personally dislike ligatures, I have no problem chunking two characters together in my head.

> e.g the triple line equals and need a higher res display to look good. Do you mean '≡' (U+2261 identical to)? Because no, it very much doesn't; in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen a font where it looked bad short of vertical misalignment with surrounding text.

It looked bad in the article.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#476
Yeah... I've got a small anecdote. I find that I write better code on lower resolution screens. Right now, I'm on a 1440x900 display at 75 dpi. And it's annoying, for sure. But it keeps my code concise and well-organized. It forces you develop your code around a mental model, instead of a visual model.

I find that at 4K, my code starts spreading out -- horizontally and vertically. That's fine when you're writing it, but when you come back to it months later, it's so hard to comprehend that much information all at once IMO. It's weird. And I might not be explaining it properly.

If you were to write your code on an 800x600 display, you would make sure that every function did not go over 800 vertical pixels. It would probably give you a headache if you did.

I can look at code and almost immediately tell that it was written on a 4K display. Oftentimes, everything is spread out and chained obtusely.

Completely different game for web dev though -- having the browser side by side with your code helps.

...

Also, 4:3 is awesome for code. All I need is two, side-by-side panes of 80-column text :)

16:9 has me glancing left to right too much.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#477
post #76

The technical details are all right (or seem right to me, anyway), but this is too opinionated for my liking. No, you do not need a 4K monitor for software development. Some people might like them, some won't. [edit/clarification: someone rightfully pointed out that nobody will actively dislike a 4K monitor. I was unclear here: I meant "some people won't need them" more than "dislike them"] This sounds like when Jeff…

Agreed. Was supplied two 4ks for my last job and just ended up using so zoomed in it wasn't even like I was using 4k monitors anymore.

My ideal setup is two 1440p monitors, but even then I tend to zoom in quite a bit.

I also had a coworker who was fine with their laptop screen. People you are finicky with these kinds of things seem to have their focus elsewhere over the actual work done.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've noticed Windows and Linux users tend to keep their windows fully maximized Interesting, I've noticed the exact opposite. Mac devs, especially younger ones, tend to have full-screen IDEs and browsers and constantly flick back and forth between apps. My theory was always that Windows and Linux users had gotten comfortable with the desktop metaphor while a large percentage of newer Mac users grew up using iPads w…

Quick note I perhaps should have clarified, I wasn't thinking about the Mac's "full screen mode". This was something I noticed about other students in my high school a decade ago (why it's coming to mind now, I have no idea), before full screen mode existed on Mac. It used to be that if you clicked the green button on Mac, most apps (not all apps, for weird aqua-UI reasons, but certainly web browsers) would grow to f…

My experience pre-full screen on macs was that the green button would do just about any random thing except make the window fill the screen. It would certainly change, usually it would fill vertically (but not always) but almost never horizontally.

To this day I still rarely press that button because of years of it doing nothing but unpredictable nonsense.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#479
Oh wow, I guess I’ll add to this thread which is so tied to the fact that we don’t have resolution independent graphics.

I wrote an essay about resolution independent graphics back in 2012 here https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...

HN commentary on this happened on two occasions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15639616 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236429

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#480
post #175
post #118

As far as I'm concerned, if I am going to buy a 4K monitor, I would probably go for a >40 inch one to be able to fit a lot of text on it rather than say a 32-inch Hi-DPI monitor. With subpixel rendering, fonts look good enough for me even on Lo-DPI displays. I'm just afraid that with Hi-DPI becoming more and more common, subpixel rendering will eventually disappear...

Doesn't a 4k monitor fit the same amount of information whether it's 24" or 40", if scaling stays the same?

Yeah, but if you are going to use the same scaling for the UI at 24" as you would at 40", your eyes might start bleeding :)

...my Android smartphone also has the same resolution (actually even slightly higher) as the monitor I'm using to type this, but I wouldn't dream to use the same scaling for both.

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