[liljimmytables]

> the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer

Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise.

> wider aspects -- they use your eyes better

Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.

[gilgoomesh]

> Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.

It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world.

Modern computer working environments (particularly programming) generally involve opening a few different documents simultaneously and having them open side-by-side. Multiple editors, browser windows, debug tools, documentation, file-trees, etc. This all needs to go somewhere. It is easier to place these separate documents side-by-side than stacked vertically.

> I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous.

Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window but if you've ever wanted to edit two documents side-by-side there's little you can do on a screen that small. You're pigeonholing yourself into a mono-tasking environment because you don't have the real-estate to present multiple documents simultaneously.

[liljimmytables]

> Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window

No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.

I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.