I find panning my eyes left and right to other monitors more natural than up and down, and I think most ergonomics experts would agree. As such a 32:9 widescreen seems preferable to a 16:8. But if you are pressed for space, either because of small desks or because of everything else going on on your desk (people who work not only in the virtual world) this seems like a great compromise.
I've always been the opposite - not a big fan of having to turn my head much when I'm working.
At home I've got 2 x 27" 9:16 monitors, one in front and one to my right (total display width ~68 cm), then my little laptop on the left (~30 cm wide) - and that's about far left or right as I can be bothered to look.
At work I've got 1 x 27" 9:16 monitor in front, and 1 x 27" 16:9 monitor on my left. The left hand side of the desktop feels very, very far away!
Partly because I work in video games, so at work I benefit from having one landscape monitor for testing the game at a realistic resolution and/or using the tools, almost all of which are always designed for use in landscape orientation.
(I could probably work around all of that, and indeed when I work at home I just suck it up and/or have things stretch across two screens. But the other part is that the monitor stand I have at work is a bit limited, so if I have both monitors in portrait orientation and move them so they're adjacent, they end up too close to me.)
Are there any window managers that let you set some kind of 'snap zones' so that you can easily tile screens without fiddling? That's my main issue with large screens vs a plurality of smaller ones.
Specifically, the FancyZones utility. I was just showing this to a guest I was hosting and blowing their minds. You can setup multiple patterns per monitor depending on a given workflow, snap windows with shortcuts or shift-dragging with the mouse, and even tab between windows in the same 'pane'.
If you use a Mac, I’ve really enjoyed using Divvy. You can define snap zones with keyboard shortcuts. It’s $20, but that’s worth it for me considering how much I use it.
Hammerspoon has the benefit that in addition to managing your windows / spaces, you can also script tons of other things in the macos interface with it: have a glance at https://www.hammerspoon.org/docs/ to see the top-level modules.
Honestly the latest Windows 10 isn’t bad in this regard and Windows 11 has improved on that without making it a chore (although the other regressions in 11 make it a strong Do Not Recommend for now). The PowerToys expansion for this feature is worth trying (it’s by Microsoft and it’s free).
I'm double-extending vscode: top monitor gets the code, bottom laptop screen gets the terminal (vscode click-to-goto file/line in stdout/stderr output is just too powerful)
why can't those be put in different spaces and just switch between spaces using keyboard. Whats the advantage of putting terminal in another monitor.
This has puzzled me for a long time as to why ppl use multiple monitors at all. Is the idea that your peripheral vision is monitoring terminal window ?
I have two 32" external monitors connected to my 17" laptop, so I use 3 screens: the laptop screen is usually for browser/slack/email, first external monitor is for Vscode code editor, second monitor is for tmux (watching a bunch of ML experiments on GPU servers).
I don't want to use different spaces on the same screen, to me it's like context switching, and I don't like that. I prefer to have everything open in front of me, so I just turn my head slightly to see what I need to see. It's like having a large work table where I can fit all my tools and materials.
Arguably if vscode allowed you to detach the terminal this would be less of an issue. But you can't, and it's part of the same screen, and making the terminal have a small horizontal section of the screen is not as good; terminal character wrapping for small vertical sections is not as good etc.
If you have never had your terminal highlight something that it detects (log line, compile error, stacktrace, test report, etc.) as a reference to a file/line/column and give you a clicky to bring that file to the front and focus it... I highly recommend you try it.
I'm not monitoring the terminal window with my peripheral vision, but when I am using the terminal I don't want to have to rearrange where my code appears.
I also have a third, vertical monitor, that typically has documentation (documentation is splendid when you can see lots of rows of text). Why that has to be "in another monitor" should be a reasonable corrollary from that.
I don’t know about terminals but having live reload on multiple monitors is a god send for frontend developer productivity. You’re experimenting most of the time.
Clearly this monitor only make sense if you get two of them and run them side by side... Imagine the glorious luxury of such setup...
I used to run two 30"s vertically, but after upgrading to high-res 32" didn't get back to such setup (would be too narrow and too tall). Two of these 27"s can be great for side-by-side again.
I got a 21:9 display for my main monitor which forced me to turn a 16:9 monitor sideways so it would fit on my desk. It's very much just meant for stuff on the side because it is not comfortable to be looking up and down like that. The best arrangement seems to be to have stuff that I'm not focusing too hard on in the top half (a YouTube video or Discord when I'm just glancing at it) and to have in the bottom half stuff that I'm more actively focusing on (general browsing or Discord when I'm doing a lot of chatting)
I'm also using a 21:9 and a 16:9 sideways. I mainly use the portrait monitor for API docs and the iOS simulator. The tall format is perfect for viewing documentation, especially browsing through long lists of classes or methods.
Also don't forget that our eyes are… you know… next to each other. Rather than stacked vertically. The aspect ratio for the average binocular human is almost 2:1 (vertical FOV is around 100°, while horizontal is up to 190°).
Actually good point, looking at that article again, 190° is edge-to-edge — i.e. also including single-eye areas.
True binocular FOV is 120° horizontal, which makes it close to a square actually.
It’s not like that remaining 70° is completely useless for monitor viewing, you will still peripherally notice any major display changes in that area, and should you need to turn your head, the partial view makes it easier to quickly find and lock onto the new target.
I've always stacked my monitors because I recline while I work, so the up/down eye motion feels natural for me. By contrast, I turn my head to see side-by-side monitors, which doesn't feel as nice to do all day.
I work at a desk, lean my chair back, and use a footrest. Here's the one I'm using now: https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07PWT8X6K/ My desk has a keyboard tray so I can keep my chair low, and I'd want something taller if I had to raise my chair.
For me, this totally eliminates back strain from working. I've also got a friend who uses a La-Z-Boy in his home office, with his laptop connected to the TV. He can't say enough good things about that setup.
A couple years ago I got a Secret Lab Titan, which does have high back/head support. I'm very happy with it. Before that, I've worked this way with whatever chair my job gave me. The head support is nice, but for me it isn't critical.
