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

Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

921–930 of 1001 posts

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#921

Post by stephc_int13 »

lifty wrote: post #620
stephc_int13 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a 4K display at work for about 18 months. I still won't trade my 1680x1050 monitors for anything else until they die. I don't mind the pixels, as long as the font rendering system is good. Of course I understand the need for a Retina display if you're working on macOS...

Not sure I follow. Are you saying that font rendering on macOS is bad?

Yes, Apple never completely embraced the somewhat hacky techniques of font rendering (hinting and subpixel AA), thus their fonts always appeared less crisp.

Desktop Linux had the same problem for a while.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#922

Post by prepperpotts »

My productivity has skyrocketed after our company moved remote, I think in large part because my home monitor is good and my office monitor was garbage. Staring at blurry text all day messes with your brain a lot more than you realize.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#924

Post by chill8 »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #490
ascar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's really about personal preference and while I know a couple of collegues with your preference, I feel it's the minority. I take two 16:9 screens over one 3840x1600 screen anytime. No need to setup some additional inner-mintor split-window management. Split-monitor management and workspaces works very well and I can even turn the 2nd monitor off, when I don't need it and want full focus mode (i.e. reading).…

I have a Dell 38" 3840 x 1600 Ultrawide and it is bliss. I don't think of it as two screens, I think of it as three. I can comfortably have three applications displayed side by side with no seam down the middle. For me, it isn't about the crispest font I can get. It is good resolution and tons of real estate.

Do you use it with Windows or MacOS? If it's Mac, do you experience any compatibility issues? I was researching quite a bit into this Dell 38" in the last few days and discovered that it does not have official Mac support, and it seems to have some issues with the USB-C connection.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#925

Post by chill8 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #77

I found this article utterly baffling. The author clearly knows their stuff, having created Fira Code, but my experiences couldn't be more different. I spend most of my days in a text browser, text editor and text terminal, looking at barely moving letters. So I optimize my setup to showing really, really good letters. I certainly appreciate how nice text looks on a high DPI display. But for coding purposes!? I don't…

Do you use it with Windows or MacOS? If it's Mac, do you experience any compatibility issues? I was researching quite a bit into this Dell 38" in the last few days and discovered that it does not have official Mac support, and it seems to have some issues with the USB-C connection.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#926

Post by glouwbug »

clarry wrote: post #849
glouwbug wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, when I moved into my new apartment I went without WiFi for 2 years and did nothing but code on my T43. In that time I managed to rewrite (a variant of) Age of Empires 2.

> (a variant of) Age of Empires 2. What's this?

https://github.com/glouw/openempires

I chip away at it now every other night. It's namely a simple multiplayer client. Britons is the only civ.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#927

Post by DudeInBasement »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #435

> Why is it 119.88 Herz, not 120 Herz? No idea. It seems to work the same. I'm guessing it's 119.88Hz because that's an even 5x multiple of the conventional "24Hz" of TV – which is really 23.976Hz.

na, they probably just used floating point and didn't care.

Re: Time to Upgrade Your Monitor

#930

Post by chipotle_coyote »

extra88 wrote: post #857
nvarsj wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, I don't have any trouble with plugging my highDPI MacBook into a crappy 1080p display at work. Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering - with fonts being a blurry mess. You can only really use MacOS with high DPI monitors now for all day working. It’s a huge problem for everyone I know who wants to plug their MacBook into a normal DPI display. Not that the subpixel/hin…

> Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor. If it matters, "Use font smoothing when…

That's been my experience, too. I prefer high-DPI monitors, but back when I was going into the office (remember going into the office?) and connecting my MacBook to a 1920x1200 monitor, text was perfectly readable. I suppose if I had two low-DPI Macs, one running Catalina and one running, I don't know, High Sierra, I might be able to tell the difference at smaller font sizes,

As an aside, I wonder whether the article's explanation of how font hinting works -- I confess for all these years I didn't know the point of "hinting" was to make sure that fonts lined up with a rasterized grid! -- explains why I always found fonts to look a little worse on Windows than MacOS. Not less legible -- arguably hinted fonts are less "fuzzy" than non-hinted fonts on lower-resolution screens, which (I presume) is what people who prefer hinted fonts prefer about them -- but just a little off at smaller sizes. The answer is because they literally are off at smaller sizes.

Post reply on HN