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jasonish
jasonish

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Monitor choices - ultrawide for dev?

I'm reworking my desk at the moment. For the last 10 years I've been use 3 idential 24" (1920x1200) screens. Anyways, to force myself to upgrade I've parted those out to family members and am sitting in front of a 27" 2k monitor, but its not enough.

I could either add another 27" or 32" screen.. Or may add 2 to get triple display, but I think that may be overkill with 27" screens. Or maybe an ultrawide?

Anyone used an ultrawide for development? How did it compare to a multiple monitor setup?

This is purely for development, I don't game. On Linux.

Thanks!

Oldest comments (2)

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spartanatreyu profile image
Jayden Pearse

In general, the whole point of an ultra-wide is to not need two monitors.

If you do a lot of visual work or viewport-specific css, I'd probably go for a single large higher-res (4k or 5k) screen.

If your often context switching between tasks and need to monitor those tasks while they're running (writing/photoshopping/whatever while a video is encoding), two 16:9 screens can be handy.

If you spend a lot of time looking at code and the output of that code (web dev, game dev, etc...), I'd go for two 16:9 screens but place one of them in a portrait orientation and put your code on that screen. That way you can look at your results on a regular screen and refer back to your code on the vertical screen.

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darksmile92 profile image
Robin Kretzschmar

I used two 32" monitors from LG a long time and recently had the same idea to replace the two with one 4k ultra wide.

In the beginning it felt strange to position two windows next to each other on this big screen, but right now I am used to it and it has space to place three windows next to each other comfortably.
The difference between moving side to side with your head to look at another monitor (even if it is just a small movement) and just rolling your eyes left and right on the ultra-wide one does not seem big at first, but over time it makes a big difference for me at least!