4 ms·
It's surprising that none of the major laptop manufacturers have thought to offer a model for developers. All I can think is that we're just too small a minori
by jasonkester 16y ago
It's surprising that none of the major laptop manufacturers have thought to offer a model for developers. All I can think is that we're just too small a minority for it to be profitable.
As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Widescreen knocks out 90% of the choices, and that overlaps with the 90% who break up the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn block that programmers need to be sitting up there intact under our right pinky.
Dell Latitude and Lenovo's T series were keeping me alive for several years there, but both of them are now getting skinnier and wider to the point where I dread having to buy a new dev machine.
Worse, netbooks have pushed small notebooks completely out of the market. There is simply no modern equivilent to the ThinkPad X51, with its tons of power, intact keyboard, 4:3 aspect ratio, bombproof steel case and 12" size.
Here's hoping things will change...
- micheljansen 16y agoSpeak for yourself. I do all my web- and application development on laptops and desktop systems with wide screen monitors and I love it. Yes, my code always takes up the full height of the screen and only part of its width, but I use the remaining space for keeping documentation, utilities and the app I am developing open alongside my code. I wouldn't go back to 4:3 at all.
- avar 16y agoI'm a developer and I never use the ins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys. I use the equivalent readline and Emacs keybindings for those. I develop on Debian running on a MacBook Pro. Sometimes the screen size bothers me, but the laptop being bigger would probably inconvenience me more. I might be an unusual case, but perhaps what you imagine the market for developers to be isn't the actual market for developers.
- moe 16y agoins/home/pgup/del/end/pgdn keys How do you scroll up in a terminal window?
- mquander 16y agoavar: "...Emacs" moe: "...a terminal window" Redundancy alert!
- moe 16y agoNo, I meant in bash. I guess as a developer he spends some time there (that might be a false assumption, of course). I've been using Shift+PGUP for ages and absolutely despise Laptops where it's buried under FN+Cursor - which usually requires both hands to press. Perhaps there's an alternative key combination that I don't know about - which is part of why I ask.
- sausagefeet 16y agoIn Terminal.app I just wave my fingers over the track pad to scroll. However 99.9% of the time I'm in a screen window which maintains its own buffer. Fn + Up/Down is Page Up/Down in most applications I've used.
- flurie 16y agoI can't speak for others, but I usually run a M-x shell process in Emacs.
- avar 16y agoAll of my bash shells are run in GNU screen. So scrolling up is C-a [ to enter copy-mode. Then C-u to scroll up and C-d to scroll down.
- larrik 16y agoI use Home and End like crazy, which is one reason I haven't switched to OS/X as my main machine.
- geeksam 16y agoCtrl+A and Ctrl+E work in most input controls, and definitely work in the terminal.
- prewett 16y ago> As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Back in The Day, I got 80 columns and 25 rows on the VT100 terminal, and had no problems programming. Loved it, in fact. (Although anything less than 9600 baud was kind of painful) While I definitely agree about the 300 pixels at the bottom, and I miss my ThinkPad T42 even compared to my 17" MacBook Pro, life as a developer is great! Emacs still works, I can read documentation AND code AND the documentation is all prettified HTML with links you can click on. OpenGL hardware acceleration makes stuff so much easier now than what I had 10 years ago. On the Windows side, Intellisense is getting pretty good, as is Eclipse/NetBeans if you use Java. And while the widescreen misses some pixels, for UI work, it's almost like having two monitors, if you keep your code to about 80 characters and your app small. Plus, you can watch widescreen movies if you get tired of coding :)
- Adaptive 16y agoI'm on a 16:9 ratio "notbook" (ThinkPad x100e) and with xmonad set to split a two-up view at the golden ratio, I get a 80 columns on the left pane (for certain values of Terminus). Love it.
- gsharm 16y ago16:9 displays fit human field of vision better. This isn't a hardware problem, it's a software problem. And there's no such thing as a ThinkPad X51.
- jasonkester 16y agoX61, sorry. They're a few hundred bucks on eBay these days, and can give a modern 17" laptop a run for its money if you max out memory and give it a fast hard drive: http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=ThinkPad+X61 http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=ThinkPad+X61