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Discussion on: The Complete Guide To Using One Monitor As A Programmer.

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Love the perspective of a single monitor user!

And I do agree with a lot of the points here despite my setup.

They key to any productive setup is something you and @jeremyf touched on, context switching!

The screen real estate is only useful if you need to see multiple things at once and they aren’t distractions. If you have slack open and in view, bad idea!

One tip to add that I used before I became a monitor addict was multiple desktops.

Have only 2 windows open at a time on each desktop and if you need to switch task use a different desktop. This “separation of concerns” keeps distractions to a minimum and makes switching between IDE and browser for example much quicker!

I think it also depends on your job type. Back end and doing code heavy jobs, single monitor FTW for focus.

Front end design or full stack, I can almost guarantee that multiple monitors work better as you have to reference so many different things at once and the constant switching from design docs to IDE to browser to terminal becomes a major bottleneck!

Great perspective on it and certainly a valuable contribution to show the other side of the story!

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

I really need to see if I get a new email, sometimes are something important that I need to answer relatively quick. The same occurs most of the time with MS Teams so I need at least 2 screens when working.

Let's imagine that I work alone plus that I don't really need to have the email and a chat app visible all the time for any reason.

If I'm doing backend dev I'll eventually need to test things using postman, in the app itself, have some Git Gui or terminal, have a place to take some notes, maybe a kamban as well to organise myself.
If I'm doing frontend it's the same (maybe I can get rid of postman) plus I'll need to see the designs (Figma, Abstract, Adobe XD...) and some times I'll be in need to compare both side by side.

Alt+Tab let you switch between the current window in context and the one that was in context before so everytime you hit a different thing, alt tab will provide a different window cycle order.

Is it possible to work with a single screen? Definetely.
Is it better and/or more efficient than having two or more? Definetely not.

😆