[chrismorgan]

How about two vertical monitors? I use a laptop and normally also have connected two 27″ monitors, both vertically oriented, above it. There are certain code tasks that really benefit from the increased height of vertical orientation; as an example, last week I was doing some substantial rebasing, and the increased vertical height in a four-way diff was invaluable. Most of the time I find I’m actually using at most one of the external displays, but it’s definitely still common to get practical value out of both of them. Referring to web pages or other documents on vertical screens is also normally better—mostly normally because they’re half the DPI of my laptop display.

  ┌────┬────┐
  │    │    │
  │    │    │
  │    │    │
  └──┬─┴──┬─┘
     │    │
     └────┘

(The slight off-centring of the laptop in this diagram is also curiously realistic; early on, a couple of years ago, I had it centred; but a few weeks ago I looked closely at where it had ended up, and found that I consistently placed the laptop definitely right of centre, and favour the right-hand monitor to the left.)

A few others in the company use one or more vertical screens too. Those of us who do, certainly like the increased vertical space.

Quality of window management is also going to be an important factor: of the two main OSes: Windows is good at simple window-per-screen and two-tiled-windows-per-screen arrangements; macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it. (I’m on Windows for now, but I’m planning on trying Arch Linux, which I previously used, on my Surface Book, as it’s now probably good enough to work with. With Sway (i3 clone for Wayland), its handling of such a screen arrangement will be superb.)

[xvector]

So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe).

It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.

[qwertox]

This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses. Just moving the eyeballs up is not enough, you have to move the head a lot. I use three horizontal 24' monitors and find it almost ideal. I could use one more stacked vertically where I place some windows which I glance at less often than a minute or so, like a grid of tmux panes containing logs.

[reaperducer]

This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses.

I have fairly aggressive progressive trifocals, and don't have problems with my 27" portrait monitors. I just angle them so the top tilts toward me.

[pytyper2]

How far do each of you sit from the monitors?

[mixmastamyk]

Perhaps the problem you've experienced is with the 16:9 monitors that were forced on everyone a ~half decade back. Or rather 9:16 in this orientation. I still (barely) prefer them vertical, but it is true they are not optimal either.

I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.

I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.

[matthewfcarlson]

I have a Surface Studio as my main work monitor and two vertical 16:9 monitors I keep terminals and documents on. It's great for editing code and having windows side by side. I think we may seem a little bit of a resurgence of the 3:2 aspect ratio, but that maybe be wishful thinking.

[gibba999]

I'd like a citation here. Keeping your headed tilted at an odd angle for months is ergonomically unsafe. Head motions? I've never seen studies that motion was unsafe, so long as the neutral position was neutral. Indeed, all I've seen suggests you want to move and stretch more.

The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.

[arkades]

> The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk.

That’s because it is bunk. Low back pain researchers found ages ago that the most ergonomic setup for alleviating back pain was the one that let you shift positions every 15 minutes or so. There is no position so ergonomic that the body can tolerate holding it for extended periods of time.

[kaishiro]

Sorry - are you asking the parent for a citation on how it made them feel?

[twic]

That's actually a perfectly legitimate thing to ask for. Our feelings and subjective experiences are very real, but our recall of them is terrible. Properly tracked, they're useful data, and such tracking could be cited here. Summoned up from memory, they're noise.

[kaishiro]

I don't want to live in a world where feelings are only valid when backed up with a spreadsheet.

[gibba999]

Parent never described how it made them feel -- they described the motions they made, and called that not ergonomically safe. If op has said "I got a kink in my neck," it'd be a different story.

[cgriswald]

I have a setup similar to GP’s except with a horizontal monitor between the two vertical monitors. The part of my desk holding the monitors is physically separate from the part my keyboard rests on so I can sit as close or as far away as I like. I tend to sit father back than I do with my gaming rig which is a single curved ultra wide. Probably better on my eyes. Most of my work is on the horizontal screen. Vertical screens are typically used for referencing information or if I use them heavily for other purposes I tend to have windows at the same level of as the horizontal screen.

[reaperducer]

So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe)

Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)

The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.

[twic]

I've got this layout:

  ┌────┐       ┌────┐
  │    ├───────┤    │
  │····│       │····│
  │    │       │    │
  └────┴───────┴────┘

Two portrait, one landscape (actually all the same size, which i couldn't be bothered to do in the diagram, sorry); one window maximised on the landscape, and each portrait tiled with two windows.

It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.

To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.

But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.

Maybe i should try this:

                  ┌────┐
  ┌───────┬───────┤    │
  │   ·   │       │····│
  │   ·   │       │    │
  └───────┴───────┴────┘

Use the left for docs/spreadsheets/plots, middle for the IDE, top right for monitoring/CI/market data, bottom right for terminals.

[kakarot]

Some of us will change our entire lifestyle just to find reasons to donate screen space to live data streams for no reason other than that it looks cool and satisfies our deep-seated nerd fantasies.

[gotenyama]

I agree . I even have multiple workspaces in OS X for the vertical monitors ( tweet deck , vs code and terminal ).

[wybiral]

Having market data, email, and slack up seems really distracting. If I'm writing code I try to remove everything that isn't related to that project.

I may have docs or a search window on one monitor and the IDE in another but I'll completely log out of anything social (including email).

[tigershark]

What is the point of a 4-way diff? I never used a rebase workflow and I always merge. When merging you compare the common ancestor with the two different branches, and it’s the perfect use case for a three monitors setup with the three-way diff. From what I understand rebasing is pretty much the same but it rewrites history to have a single branch. Why you would need a 4-way diff in a rebase instead of a 3-way diff?

[cma]

If you want to see what changed between two versions you are merging (both without your changes), your currently in progress merge, and your current version before you started merging.

[novaleaf]

Cheap 4k TV's are great. Here's my layout

  ┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  └────┴────┘└────┴────┘└────┴────┘

I have 3x 39" 4K TV's as my monitors. As Shown in the above, I use them as the equivlant of 6x ultra-talls.

I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.

Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.

[4ec0755f5522]

You have to be fussy about the TVs. There are two main issues.

1) Input lag. A mouse 200+ms behind is frustrating to work with.

2) Color space. I forget the terms off hand, but basically if the panel has poor colour space / bit depth / whatever, fonts start looking really bad.

Maybe you lucked out or just don't notice/care about these, but that's one of the core reasons people don't use TVs.

I'm quite tempted to get a large good one though.

[onetom]

Most TVs have some weird effect where it just puts white dots in the middle of the strokes of a charater glyph. However, I've seen several Samsung TVs which doesn't suffer from this phenomena and can be used as proper monitors.

For coding purposes I don't think color accuracy matters much, but I see why latency might annoy some people, though it doesn't bother me.

[novaleaf]

on my seiki tv's you can remove that by setting "sharpening" to zero.

probably could do that on the samsungs too, burried in the menus somewhere.

[Todd]

I use a 43" 4k TV as a monitor and it's great. It's on the outside range of size due to the 100 ppi pitch.

You're referring to chroma subsampling. Rtings does a review of 4k TVs that support 4:4:4 chroma.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/by-usage/pc-monitor

This page also has a link to their subsampling article.

[fxfan]

Please pardon my comment with limited background knowledge but are you sure that TVs, with their hardware designed to make you look from far are a good idea to keep close to your eyes?

Also, where do you get 39" 4K for $300!?

[nitrogen]

What would be different about a close up LCD panel vs a distance LCD panel?

[Scoundreller]

BestBuy has them. Probably Costco too.

TVs have moved on a lot in the past 3-4 years. The most difficult part about 39" TVs is finding something that small.

[semi-extrinsic]

I have 1x 43" 4K monitor (Dell P4317Q), and together with a tiling WM it's pretty awesome as you say. It's more expensive (I think $800), not sure if it's sufficiently better as to be worth it.

[antongribok]

I have the same (single) monitor and love it. $699 at MicroCenter.

I like to sum up this debate like this:

With multiple monitors, you're confined into smaller, "hard-coded" boxes that can't be changed. With a single large screen you have much more flexibility.

[onetom]

You need extra functions in your window manager for moving between screens with multiple monitors. Depending on their placement the shortcuts might be non-intuitive. Different screen resolutions lead to unnatural movement of the mouse cursor between screens.

I've also found that such extra complexity impacts productivity negatively. It's an unnecessary distraction trying to communicate such complicated layouts.

[onetom]

I'm just using a 27" 5K iMac, BUT sometimes I change its resolution from the default, virtually 2560x1440 one to the highest DPI, which I guess is the native 5120x2880 and I just pull it closer and/or lean closer to it.

I think for programming the 2560/1600 = 1920/1200 = 1.6 or the 3000/2000 = 1.5 ratio is a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately it's not a common ratio among big but cheap monitors...

The extra head movement required to look into the corners of a 27" or even a 25" vertical monitor definitely puts a little strain on my neck compared to a 25" horizontal one, but with frequent posture changes and breaks, while a bit tiring, I don't feel it caused any permanent damage.

At least I hope it's not the reason why the middle of my upper back feels like falling apart any minute... Maybe that thai massage, when a lady was walking on my back for half an hour was a bit too much? :D

[pault]

Yes! I have the same and despite spending thousands of dollars trying to find a better monitor it's still best solution I've found. I can keep 4x80 column files open in vscode or 8 if I split them vertically. And with a single monitor I can still easily use a KVM switch.

[oliwarner]

How far away are they? That's a lot of physical space to cover.

I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.

But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.

[novaleaf]

they sit about 2' to 3' from me, just like a normal monitor.

it's only about 2' of vertical space, but 8' of horizontal, so I have them laid out in a semi-circle.

I have 39" seiki TV's, all about 4 years old now. As one of the other posters mentioned, it actually seems rare to find any 4K TV that small any more. But a brief search on amazon shows you can still get stuff in that price range, but Seiki seems to be gone :(

[oliwarner]

Sorry, I did mean horizontal.

At three foot, you have a circumference of 18foot. The idea of almost 180° of monitors still unsettles me. That's beyond neck work, that's practically into separate workspaces. If you're looking at the left side of Monitor 1, Monitor 3 is physically out of —even peripheral— eyeline.

I don't know why I'm flapping on about it. If it works for you, that's great.

[novaleaf]

you are right that 3 monitors is excessive. I find myself only really using 2 of them.

Using the 3rd requires me to twist my upper body a bit uncomfortably. as a result I find that I tend to keep it dedicated to little used apps, like email and sourcetree (a git gui)

[_bxg1]

macOS has terrible native window management, but there are a number of window manager programs that are as good as what's available on Linux. BetterTouchTool is my favorite.

[onetom]

Spectacle (https://www.spectacleapp.com/) is also open source and it's tiny, but only works with keyboard.

Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB). Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.

In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.

I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.

To be fair IntelliJ didn't work with xmonad out of the box either. I had to set some strange `startupHook = setWMName "LG3D"` Source: https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#P...

[guaka]

ShiftIt helps me a lot. Basic, simple keyboard shortcuts. And it's free (as in free speech). https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt

[bastih]

I've become quite fond of Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst). Especially it's 3Column Middle Wide layout in combination with swapping windows using the mouse and mouse pointer being placed in the middle of a switched-to window have been godsents for my daily workflows.

[asselinpaul]

https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/ is terrific

[0az]

Interesting. I currently use Amethyst, but I might give BetterTouchTool a shot. How do the wm features compare to say, i3?

[chrisweekly]

Divvy is simple and works well for my needs.

[sundvor]

Triple for me. Have an Ergotech stand with the extra wide arm. In the middle sits a 21:9 34" 3440x1440, then on each side floating in the air a 16:10 24" 1920x1200.

Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.

[SkyPuncher]

This is pretty much my setup too. Although, I also have my Mac screen running.

* Center - main focus of work (normally an IDE) * Left - Documentation * Right - Browser/Simulator * Mac - Slack/Chat/Email/Calender

[sundvor]

That's awesome. A fourth display for Slack/Email would be great, but I've run out of space above due to putting my centre speaker there. :)

All through USBC daisy chaining? I have three display ports on a 1080TI, but it's fascinating to see how much flexibility Type C allows.

[ur-whale]

TL;DR : if you want to mount monitors vertically side-by-side, try before you buy.

One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.

That sounds weird, so let me explain:

LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).

Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.

But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.

It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.

[raamdev]

> macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.

I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.

1. https://www.madrau.com/ 2. https://www.spectacleapp.com/

[seanmcdirmid]

I tried this before and my neck was sore for a week. It was really really painful. I’ve basicslly given up on dual monitors in general, give me one 27” 5K (iMac) monitor and I’m happy.

[tigershark]

I found that the most problems are for the eyes, if the monitors take too much of your FOV. I worked in the past with 8 monitors and after a while it really impairs my ability to focus far away. Luckily it seems reversible after several months, especially if you spend a lot of time outside looking far away.

[walterbell]

You can place monitors at different distances from your eyes. Screen resolution can be changed to maintain perceived relative size of onscreen objects.

For eye health, have the monitors backing a window (or 20+ feet of empty space), so that you can periodically (at least every 20 minutes) look past the monitors at an "infinite" plane.

[tigershark]

It’s not practical in an open office with everything standardised. Sure in an Home Office you can do pretty much what you want if you have enough space.

[walterbell]

You can at least position the laptop closer than the monitor, which gives you two focal planes. In an open office, there should be many "distant" objects to use as a temporary third focal plane.

[nitrogen]

I brought my own clamp-on monitor arms to the open office I work in and installed them myself without asking anyone. You might be able to get away with the same.

[reaperducer]

I use portrait monitors, too. Great for web development. You can see an entire web page you're working on in a single glance. No scrolling!

It's helps with coding, too, but scrolling is still usually necessary there.

macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.

MacOS is good for doing it horizontally, but you're right — there should be a mechanism for vertical tiling on portrait displays in macOS.

[GordonS]

I recently switched to a landscape 28" 3K monitor as my main monitor, with a portrait 24" monitor as secondary - I've found this arrangement suits me really well. I typically have a console window open in the lower half of the portrait monitor, then something else in the top half depending on what I'm doing (maybe unit tests window, or a DB admin tool, whatever)

[tootie]

Yeah, and that's even the hero image of this article with no mention. I find having a secondary monitor in portrait is great. Laptop is primary, but the portrait is great for reading. Also, for debugging for mobile.

[enriquto]

This, but the middle cut may be annoying. The ideal shape would be a square monitor, with a very high resolution.

[chrismorgan]

That will depend a little on the window management techniques employed. For me, it works very well, and I would actually consider a seamless blend of the two displays to be a slight regression, given Windows’ automatic snap behaviour or i3-like layout.

But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)

[mynegation]

I used to have 2 monitors side by side turned vertically. The problem for me was that the rotation was down in software in the video driver and many redraws were noticeably slower. It was long ago though (2007 ish), maybe modern performance makes it unnoticeable.

[FooHentai]

The other issue I've noticed is the (polarizing?) filter built into monitors seems to be oriented for landscape viewing only. So when you have screens in portrait, there's no perfect viewing angle that lets you see all the way left to right on the screen surface, without the filter obscuring one of the sides.

[baldeagle]

If you’re on windows, display fusion is a top notch window manager, it gives a single button to span wide across all screens for time when you want on window to rule them all.

[jmlucjav]

my setup is two 27" vertical monitors for the desktop, and to the left a 19" vertical for the laptop, and then the laptop. Couldn't be happier

[xondono]

If you need to use macOS for any reason, I’d recommend magnet.

It’s last update is a bit buggy, but it’s great

[karolsputo]

I would also recommend Spectacle if you like simplicity and believe in open source.

[jacobsenscott]

Recently switched from spectacle to amethyst. So far I'm happy. Every now and then it bugs out and you need to restart it, but in general I spend less time adjusting window positions.

It really only makes sense on large screens though. If you spend a lot of time on the laptop screen overlapping windows + spectacle is better.

[junglelaser]

I've been using BetterSnapTool for the same thing for 5 years or so now and I love it!

[gregd]

I've been using Divvy for years and love it