Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

I am old old old, and I agree. This is probably something Mac users would notice once they are used to 'retina' resolution. At work we have two monitors on stalks and laptops. Work provides laptops to plug into these. The big (23"?) monitors are big, that's all. They hold less text than the laptop screen and it's much worse to read. I just use the laptop as it's easier on the eyes. At home I always had multiple monitors but once I got a 4K monitor, at most I have the laptop open for more screen, often CNBFed. All this is probably more based on what you are used to. If you have big screens and nothing of 'retina' resolution you are not going to care until you do.

> 1. No matter what operating system you're on, you'll eventually run into an application that doesn't render in high dpi mode

You lost me right here on line 1.

If there are apps on MacOS that can't handle high dpi mode, I haven't run into them as a developer (or doing photo editing, video editing, plus whatever other hobbies I do). Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work.

> 3. Configuring my preferred linux environment to work with 4k is either impossible or just super time consuming.

Things like this are exactly why I left Linux for MacOS. I absolutely get why you might want to stick with Linux, but this is a Linux + HighDPI issue (maybe a Windows + highDPI issue also), not a general case.

> I genuinely think 4k provides no real benefit to me as a developer unless the screen is 27" or higher, because increased pixel density just isn't required.

You could say the same for any arbitrary DPI; 96dpi isn't "Required", we got by fine with 72dpi. It's all about ergonomics as far as I'm concerned.

I've worked on a range of setups from dual screens, 120hz to little CRTs and laptop displays, and even a bit of graphing calculator and smartphone coding. My conclusion is that the difference depends mostly on the workflow, and what the workflow changes is mostly how much information you're scanning.

If you're scanning tons of text, all the time, across multiple windows, you need a lot of real estate, and in times of yore you would turn to printouts and spread them over your desk. A lot of modern dev goes in this direction because you're constantly looking up docs and the syntax is shaped towards "vertical with occasional wide lines and nesting" - an inefficient use of the screen area. Or you have multiple terminals running and want to see a lot of output from each. Or you have a mix of a graphical app, text views and docs. A second monitor absolutely does boost productivity for all these scenarios since it gives you more spatial spread and reduces access to a small headturn or a glance.

If you're writing dense code, with few external dependencies, you can have a single screen up and see pretty much everything you need to see. Embedded dev, short scripts and algorithms are more along these lines. Coding with only TTS(e.g. total blindness) reduces the amount you can scan to the rate of speech, and I believe that consideration should be favored in the interest of an inclusive coding environment. But I'm digressing a bit.

For a more objective ranking of concerns: pixel density ranks lower than refresh rates, brightness and color reproduction in my book. If the screen is lowish res with a decent pixel font that presents cleanly at a scale comfortable to the eye, and there's no "jank" in the interaction, it's lower stress overall than having smooth characters rendered in a choppy way with TN panel inverted colors, CRT flicker, or inappropriate scaling.

Book quality typography is mostly interesting for generating a complete aesthetic, while when doing computing tasks you are mostly concerned about the symbolic clarity, which for English text is reasonably achieved at the 9x14 monospace of CP437, and comfortably so if you double that. There's a reason why developers have voted en-masse to avoid proportional fonts, and it's not because we are nostalgic for typewriters.

And yet for some reason we have ended up with tools that blithely ignore the use-case and apply a generic text rendering method that supports all kinds of styling, which of course makes it slow.

I'm still in love with the default sized bitmap font used by xterm, I'd never want to look at any other font if I had a choice (which I do for terminal programs)

I appreciate your favour. I am probably an exception, but i like to code on just a single 15 inch MacBook. I switch screens by pressing key combinations. I believe faster, but also more convenient than moving your head around constantly. for me everything must be accessible by various key combos. once I have that working I hardly need to use the trackpad mouse anymore. the truth is that most people in my team's work with dual or triple screens.