Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
I have long used one monitor for writing code. And usually with only focus on one application and one tab.
The benefits I've found are reduced tendency to context shift and developing patterns/commands/behaviors for navigating to different locations in the code.
With one monitor, Slack and emails are pushed aside. As well as my browser. I focus in my text editor and the problem at hand. But to maintain quick access, to related information, I have established conventions.
My local git branches are almost always of the form jeremyf/issue---<org>/<repo>#<number>. In my text editor, I can run a function to open my browser to that issue. I also wrote a function to create that branch based on the current active tab of my browser.
These "convenience functions" help me shift to different views without entirely shifting context. What I mean by that is instead of going to my browser, searching for the issue, and possibly being tempted to look at another tab, I've made sure that I'm facilitating connecting different sources of information.
Which is all about saying: I can only actively focus on one thing, and perhaps two side by side comparisons so one monitor is adequate.
Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
As a recent adopter of Emacs, I can completely empathize! (The long running "holy war" is Vim vs. Emacs)
But what you touched on is "Use the tools that work best for you!" And my observations is "The less I can offer myself the opportunity to self-distract, the better off I'll be."
Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
I have long used one monitor for writing code. And usually with only focus on one application and one tab.
The benefits I've found are reduced tendency to context shift and developing patterns/commands/behaviors for navigating to different locations in the code.
With one monitor, Slack and emails are pushed aside. As well as my browser. I focus in my text editor and the problem at hand. But to maintain quick access, to related information, I have established conventions.
My local git branches are almost always of the form
jeremyf/issue---<org>/<repo>#<number>. In my text editor, I can run a function to open my browser to that issue. I also wrote a function to create that branch based on the current active tab of my browser.These "convenience functions" help me shift to different views without entirely shifting context. What I mean by that is instead of going to my browser, searching for the issue, and possibly being tempted to look at another tab, I've made sure that I'm facilitating connecting different sources of information.
Which is all about saying: I can only actively focus on one thing, and perhaps two side by side comparisons so one monitor is adequate.
When I wrote yesterday an article about 2 monitors, I didn't guess that I stepped into the holy war topic :)
Oh boy :) you did hehe
As a recent adopter of Emacs, I can completely empathize! (The long running "holy war" is Vim vs. Emacs)
But what you touched on is "Use the tools that work best for you!" And my observations is "The less I can offer myself the opportunity to self-distract, the better off I'll be."
I'm curious about what the code looks like, would you mind sharing it ? 😁
Sure thing:
github.com/jeremyf/dotemacs/blob/m...