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This is such a bizarre idea. I have 7 monitors on my home office - 6 24" in a 2x3 grid and a 27" widescreen vertically beside them. I use them all. It's so nic

This is such a bizarre idea. I have 7 monitors on my home office - 6 24" in a 2x3 grid and a 27" widescreen vertically beside them. I use them all. It's so nice to have my IDE, documentation, 2 terminals, CI status, Slack, music, source control, diffs, etc all visible at once. Not only is it faster to my move my eyeballs than key combo to another desktop, it's about having all the info visible at once. Your comment is like saying "Why bother having 16 registers in your CPU? Just use a single register and go out to cache every time you need a new value."

0xffff2 6y ago
As a long-time dual monitor user planning to upgrade to 3 along with an upgrade to a 3080 next month, you are a god among men and I aspire to your level of screen real estate. What does it take to run all of that these days? Can you manage with two video cards?
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  Yes, most video cards these days can run 3-4 monitors using DP. Make sure you check the stats on the specific cards you buy. https://multimonitorcomputer.com/index.php https://multimonitorcomputer.com/index.php is a good resource.
amelius 6y ago
I don't think my setup is bizarre at all. The human eye has only a small area of sharp vision, so you can't even see all your screens sharply at the same time (unless you step back). With virtual workspaces you can switch screens extremely rapidly, without even moving your eyes. And as a bonus, you're helping to save the planet as you're not burning energy for monitors you're not looking at. Another bonus is that you don't feel under-equipped anytime you move to a different computer (or a laptop). By the way, I'm curious: how do you quickly know which screen has keyboard focus without manually scanning all your screens? And how do you quickly switch between windows?
- t-writescode 6y ago
  For me, the "which window do I currently have active" problem is primarily an issue on Mac OS X since it opens all windows that have the name "Firefox" and will select focus of one ... I guess the last one that was used? But that means that some random window goes zipping by and grabs my attention - but that's not the one that's open. As for the swiping motion and "human vision can only see a little bit at a time", you're right, but I can see motion and changes in things pretty well on the edges. Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting - enough that I might forget what I'm doing. Turning my head to the right (I tend to work on my left monitor) is a much less mentally confusing experience. To add to that, right now, I have Hacker News open to the left-most, taking up half the screen, Slack in the center, and then the documentation for a new feature taking up the whole right screen. That means that my docs are a slight turn of the head away, and no distracting animations. When I close this window after completing this message, I'll easily be able to replace Slack and Firefox with my IDE (which will be split down the middle with two documents open concurrently), and I'll be able to go right to work, and my spec sheet will still be to the right of my vision and ready to be developed against. If the coding gets really, really complicated, I'll be able to easily have 3 windows open, side by side by side, at the width of the window I like (around 120 columns), all in a comfortable range. I am perfectly capable, also, of picking up my laptop and going off to the couch - I did it last night for a change in scenery - and working from there; but, I prefer the real-estate that a 1440p and a 1080p (of different sizes) next to each other provides me.
  - amelius 6y ago
    > Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting What kind of animation does your OS use? For me, on Gnome, the transition is instantaneous (no animation). Switching between workspaces is snappy. Also, if you change tabs in your browser, then you also have "the whole world changing in front of you". I'm curious what exactly makes a virtual desktop not pleasant to use for you.
    - 6y ago

0xffff2 6y ago

As a long-time dual monitor user planning to upgrade to 3 along with an upgrade to a 3080 next month, you are a god among men and I aspire to your level of screen real estate. What does it take to run all of that these days? Can you manage with two video cards?

cecilpl2 6y ago
Yes, most video cards these days can run 3-4 monitors using DP. Make sure you check the stats on the specific cards you buy. https://multimonitorcomputer.com/index.php https://multimonitorcomputer.com/index.php is a good resource.

amelius 6y ago

I don't think my setup is bizarre at all. The human eye has only a small area of sharp vision, so you can't even see all your screens sharply at the same time (unless you step back). With virtual workspaces you can switch screens extremely rapidly, without even moving your eyes. And as a bonus, you're helping to save the planet as you're not burning energy for monitors you're not looking at. Another bonus is that you don't feel under-equipped anytime you move to a different computer (or a laptop). By the way, I'm curious: how do you quickly know which screen has keyboard focus without manually scanning all your screens? And how do you quickly switch between windows?

t-writescode 6y ago
For me, the "which window do I currently have active" problem is primarily an issue on Mac OS X since it opens all windows that have the name "Firefox" and will select focus of one ... I guess the last one that was used? But that means that some random window goes zipping by and grabs my attention - but that's not the one that's open. As for the swiping motion and "human vision can only see a little bit at a time", you're right, but I can see motion and changes in things pretty well on the edges. Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting - enough that I might forget what I'm doing. Turning my head to the right (I tend to work on my left monitor) is a much less mentally confusing experience. To add to that, right now, I have Hacker News open to the left-most, taking up half the screen, Slack in the center, and then the documentation for a new feature taking up the whole right screen. That means that my docs are a slight turn of the head away, and no distracting animations. When I close this window after completing this message, I'll easily be able to replace Slack and Firefox with my IDE (which will be split down the middle with two documents open concurrently), and I'll be able to go right to work, and my spec sheet will still be to the right of my vision and ready to be developed against. If the coding gets really, really complicated, I'll be able to easily have 3 windows open, side by side by side, at the width of the window I like (around 120 columns), all in a comfortable range. I am perfectly capable, also, of picking up my laptop and going off to the couch - I did it last night for a change in scenery - and working from there; but, I prefer the real-estate that a 1440p and a 1080p (of different sizes) next to each other provides me.
- amelius 6y ago
  > Further, I find the animation experience of my whole world changing in front of me when I go to a different workspace to be incredibly distracting What kind of animation does your OS use? For me, on Gnome, the transition is instantaneous (no animation). Switching between workspaces is snappy. Also, if you change tabs in your browser, then you also have "the whole world changing in front of you". I'm curious what exactly makes a virtual desktop not pleasant to use for you.
  - 6y ago