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by twic 2630 days ago
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.
2 comments

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