Hm. I'm not convinced. Right now I'm writing a thesis. It's in LaTeX, and auto compiles when a file changes. So on one monitor I've got my text editor and the

Hm. I'm not convinced. Right now I'm writing a thesis. It's in LaTeX, and auto compiles when a file changes. So on one monitor I've got my text editor and the PDF output. It's very nice to keep writing and get the output asynchronously, with the PDF flickering to indicate it's updated, which I can see in my peripheral vision and look over at it. And, what if something goes wrong during compilation? I want my terminal to be visible, and again in my peripheral vision I'll see a sea of red error messages and know to look over there to see what I did wrong. So on my other monitor I have the terminal running the make command for auto-compiling. In practice I have more windows open: version control, citations manager program, file browser. They're all part of the same task, they are not distractions. But for this workflow I need at least the text editor, the terminal, and the PDF viewer. I'm not sure how I could do this with a single monitor without seriously compromising on the amount of my actual thesis I can see on my screen in either the text editor or the PDF - maybe shrinking the terminal down tiny so I can see the last line of output and then making it larger to see the context of the error if there was one, but that's getting a bit ridiculous. Maybe if I used a monolithic IDE for everything it would be able to fit all this information into one maximised window in a clever way, only showing me what was relevant at any one time. But if you're not using an IDE, I find that my workflow for any non-trivial task almost always involves multiple programs and windows, and switching is a pain. And when I'm making plots for my thesis, it's text editor and terminal, and then multiple matplotlib plot windows popping up when I run the command from the terminal. If I don't want to spend all my time moving the plot windows around so that I can see the code that made them whilst I decide my next move, then multiple monitors are a godsend. It's not like I'm leaving my email or facebook up permanently - that would be a terrible idea. My browser is minimised (unless I'm typing code based on online docs) and spotify is over on another desktop.