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Discussion on: How many monitors do you use when programming?

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

I do everything on my laptop. I run most things maximized or near-to-maximized but use hot-keys to quickly switch between applications.

Overall, I find too much screen real-estate to be more of a pain than a value. I touch-type and I use a mouse-pad so I don't have to take my hands of the home-row: why would I want to have a screen-expanse so large that I'd need to do more than move my eyes?

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j_mplourde profile image
Jean-Michel Plourde

When I am on laptop undocked, I only have one screen and I use linux workspaces a lot so it keeps things seemless. Do you use any tool for your windows management?

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II • Edited

<ALT><TAB> and <ALT><SHIFT><TAB> all the way, baby!

I'm pretty much a minimalist in all things.
 
 
 
edit: forgot that Dev's MD parser eats thing that look like HTML tags.

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j_mplourde profile image
Jean-Michel Plourde

I wasn't sure to understand your first version of that comment. That's nice then, also what I use

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nssimeonov profile image
Templar++ • Edited

May I recommend using virtual desktops then? On MacOS it works better using the trackpad, but still better, than alt-tabbing. You can arrange your programs sort of "visually" and you know "left desktop is code", "right one" are the docs. The animation sort of helps the feeling, that you are rotating your head to look at the second monitor (without actually putting extra stress on your neck)

Win+Ctrl+Arrows on window

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Virtual desktops have been a thing since OLVWM (late 80s/early 90s - used to use it on the Sun workstations at my University). I also used to carry a MBP - used to use virtual desktops. To be honest, it never felt much more useful than just straight stacking of windows and TAB-navigating.

/shrug

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nssimeonov profile image
Templar++

Me neither until I got a Mac and discovered how useful the trackpad is... and I got a Macbook because my ultra-great HP Elitebook 8740w had a totally inadequate heating system and fried my hard drive so I had to work on something that week and there was this MB Air nearby.

Now I'm on a desktop and rarely use them, but it felt so good "peeking the desktop on the left" on the other laptop...

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

I use a ZBook. It's a furnace, too. At the time I bought it, it was because I was locally running VMs. Six months after buying it, all my VMs run in the cloud.

I'm thinking of going to a less roided out system when I replace it. I mean, I don't really do anything locally that four cores and 32GiB of RAM benefit from (well, other than Firefox and Chrome's voracious RAM appetites).

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Deniz Can Çığşar

MacOS'es virtual desktop switch animations actually slows and distracts me.. I wish there was an option with no animations, because that way unnecessary windows title bars etc will be removed.. But Apple knows everything right?

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

"Apple knows everything" would be the crux of why I refuse to buy Apple products. :p