[mark_l_watson]

I am a minority opinion here. I don’t like turning my head and I like just having everything I need for a 2 hour sprint visible at once on the screen.

At home I use a MacBook with a 22” retina I bought at the Apple store, the external monitor place directly above the laptop. I rarely do video or photo editing, but I spend a lot of time writing books and also programming. This is plenty of space for me. This is not a matter of money: 6 months after I bought this monitor for my home use, I started working at a large financial services company; I could choose any monitor(s) I wanted and I chose exactly what I have at home.

I don’t multi-task, especially in my home office. I like having just what I need for my current task visible.

I bought a System76 Oryx Pro last fall with a 16” 4K display and I find the screen size so adequate to my development needs (I use that laptop just for machine learning, it has a 1070 GPU) that I don’t even bother hooking it up to an external monitor.

I have spent so many years working on remote servers in a few SSH shell windows. This might affect the setup I chose for all-local development and writing.

EDIT: corrected second sentence

[y4mi]

It depends heavily on what you're doing.

There is little benefit in multiple monitors for Office work (Excel, word, etc). Server admins have some benefits for multimonitors.. i.e keeping documentation open while you're on the server etc.

Especially if the Excel rows arent too wide

GUI development gets massive value from multiple monitors. Nothing beats having the application open and visible while you're changing the code.

It gets even more important if you're a full stack developer, which has several terminals open to keep track of logs, a browser for the webpage you're modifying and the editor for changes.

[o10449366]

You definitely raise some valid use cases where you need more real estate, but I think a big reason people on Mac/Windows feel like they need more space is because window management is so poor on those platforms. I came from Linux where I used tiling window managers and I really missed that on Mac. I ended up installing Amethyst and while it's not nearly as powerful as the window managers I was using before, it almost entirely killed my desire for my real estate. Now I can quickly and evenly split my editor, terminal, and browser into various layouts and adjust them as needed.

[KozmoNau7]

Office/office work can absolutely benefit from multiple monitors or large monitors. For instance, having spreadsheets open for reference, at the same time as a document you're writing.

[criddell]

I'm most productive on a single (big) 4k screen. I normally run at 125% scaling and it's perfect for my work (desktop application developer). My main Windows desktop is where I work (usually Visual Studio or PyCharm plus a browser) then I have a second virtual desktop where I have stuff that I need throughout the day, but use infrequently (music player, email, slack, skype). I have keyboard shortcuts to jump to any of my frequently used applications.

I'm easily distracted so I want to keep as few windows in view as possible.

I keep a book and a guitar near my desk and rather than jump to Reddit or HN when I'm rebuilding, I'll read a few pages, play some scales, or go make some tea.

[mark_l_watson]

+1 for keeping a book and guitar handy! I keep my guitar packed away but do keep an American Indian flute and a didgeridoo handy. I think music, played briefly while waiting for a machine learning experiment, large Haskell project build, etc. is much better than web browsing because it does not ruin focus.

[onetom]

+1 for playing some music as a form of break. When I was younger I often practiced simple songs on a tin-whistle, recorder, kaval or flute. I liked the saxophone the most but that requires too much maintenance, hence it's a distraction.

[quadcore]

I don’t like turning my head

Same here, I dont like to "sit" in a position where my head is turned because it can hurt my neck.

[o10449366]

Agreed. Another reason I prefer this setup is because I don't like using an external mouse or trackpad with my Macbook Pro. I use the swipe options extensively to switch workspaces and I like having my hands close to my typing position at all times.

[333c]

> I use the swipe options extensively to switch workspaces

The mouse that I have lets me remap the buttons, so I have two of them mapped to "switch left" (like a three-finger swipe) and "switch right." I find that that is pretty nice for me.

[arendtio]

> I don’t like turning my head

Same here, that's why I have one of my desktop monitors (~22") above the other. At work, I used a similar setup with my ThinkPad in a docking station as the lower screen, but then again you get the small screen penalty ;-)

[pbhjpbhj]

Or mount an ultrawide vertically.