91–96 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just open two buffers side by side and it's almost like you have two 4:3 monitors. Isn't that better?
Not if you're only working on one document at a time. Being distracted by some other stuff on the side is not always a benefit and many editors are surprisingly hard to set up to center documents on the screen while blending out anything on the sides.
(Controversial) Corollary resulting from this 16:9 domination: the maximum length of a source code line should be increased. 80 characters seems to be not the best fit for modern IDE on 16:9 screens. (I hate that, but praying for a 16:10 monitor comeback did not work. Also, it is getting worse with hidpi monitors)
Or is this a call for mainstream operating systems and applications to get creative (read, nice tiling or splitting by default)? What if all browsers suported single page split view? So that the left side was your regular view, half width, and the right side was the continuation of the same page, where the left side ended.
+ 1.
Our two eyes are placed horizontally, giving us a landscape field of view. Yet, left-right eye movement/tracking is limited, so print or online reading material is mostly portrait. I guess we did not really evolve for reading! :-)
The book printing industry did not face this problem as they print on both sides of a page and then position these as the left and right pages of an open book! And sometimes also use of multi-columns formats when using wider papers (e.g., newspapers) or smaller fonts (e.g., journal papers).
Could someone not create a browser plugin that automatically lays out the content onto the left and right sides like a book? How would scrolling work is a question, as also asked by a comment here [1]. Do we really need scrolling? Aren't page flips just sufficient? :-)
Or is this a call for mainstream operating systems and applications to get creative (read, nice tiling or splitting by default)? What if all browsers suported single page split view? So that the left side was your regular view, half width, and the right side was the continuation of the same page, where the left side ended.
How would scrolling work? If both panes went up or down a little, I'd find it a little jarring. Maybe I would get used to it, I don't know.
So, he doesn't like 16:9 or 16:10 because he doesn't use the extra space? I think I couldn't live without a wide-screen.. screen. Most of the time, I have 2 or 3 files side-by-side. I also think that the author actually has a different problem: a bad trackpad. He stated he needs to scroll a lot to view content, and a nice trackpad goes a long way with this. It all comes down to opinion; I'd rather have a wide screen…
The most important use-case I have for side-by-side windows is having a file explorer as the second window, which too does not need half the width. I disable the tree pane (using tabs instead if I need multiple folders together), and do a 3:1 split for the windows. Even then, I see myself always maximizing the primary window for a better focus.
I place the Windows taskbar on the sides to create more vertical space for documents, and discovered accidentally that placing it on the right side made it less distracting for work. (Perhaps given left-to-right reading order, our initial focus is skewed towards the left.) These seemingly little things do make a significant difference to usability and productivity.