While I don't doubt that more screen real estate helps most programmers, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. In the past few years my work environment would change

While I don't doubt that more screen real estate helps most programmers, it's not a hard-and-fast rule. In the past few years my work environment would change from day to day (different offices and coffee shops) so I didn't have the luxury of lugging around large monitors and instead worked exclusively from my laptop's small display. As a result of this and my dislike for Mac OSX's default window navigation I set up my own hotkeys for switching between my most frequent applications (documented here: http://techiferous.com/2009/12/streamlining-your-workflow-with-applescript/ http://techiferous.com/2009/12/streamlining-your-workflow-wi... ). Now when I am presented with an option of hooking up more monitors to my laptop I decline because my inter-app workflow is so streamlined on (and optimized for) my tiny laptop screen.