alt Hacker NewsI spent decades completely happy with Cmd+Tab. Now I’m helping someone develop a trading system and I need to see several log files simultaneously, a broker GUI, and neovim.
Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level.
FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly.
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Yeah, I've moved back and forward between multiple monitors and a single one, multiple times throughout my professional career, depending on what I'm doing. Game development usually makes me end up using at least two monitors, just programming frontend/backend usually works best with a single monitor (for whatever reason), producing music and video editor also works best with at least two monitors, but other creative things like writing works best with one, and so on.
At least personally, there is not a single setup that works for everything, I'm switching basically as often as I change what I work on.
M-x on a tiling window manager. I agree Cmd+Tab / Ctrl+Tab is inefficient. Linear vs constant time context switch.
>but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly.
LOL
Im currently typing this on a work issued Macbook thats about 2 years old at this point, and 40% of the time, when I plug in a cable, it decides it wants to turn on and turn off hdmi output in rapid succession.
The reason I love my old cheap 1080p monitors so much is because they need less organizational overhead compared to a large 4k monitor where you constantly have to fix UI scaling bugs and zoom in/out, force different fonts for shitty web pages etc.
I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a malware analyst most of the time) I am losing my mind with all the notifications and blocking popup windows all the time. I have no idea why people are tolerating this as their work setup. It is hostile design to its users.
I use my computer to work. I don't want a computer that works me all the time.
[1] for desktop/GUI apps I use a mixture of GNOME forks and LXDE apps. Everything that makes popups when running in the background is avoided.*
I was about to post something very similar: the degree of benefit you get from having multiple displays depends a lot on the amount of multi-tasking that you have.
If you can focus most of your time on a single window then a single monitor is just fine.
But when you have to reason across multiple windows very very often then multiple displays help a lot.
For me it’s a bit messy: i am a cloud engineer and the kind of work i do varies multiple times a day. At some point I’m writing terraform code and all i need is my editor and a shell (sometimes my editor is in my shell) while ten minutes later i might be doing incident response and then i need a multitude of windows (shell, web browser showing logs, web browser showing metrics, web browser showing the aws console, web browser showing the meeting with other people handling the incident with me, shell, other stuff)…
So yeah, it really depends.
Great example of "what works for you" I think - I'm in the camp of:
I did multiple monitors for a long time, and probably my best productivity thing was switching to one AND ONLY ONE big enough 4k. Basically allows me to switch between "one focused monitor most of the time" and "the equivalent of 2 or 3, maybe even 4" if I need it.