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I recently switched to a single 6k monitor after using dual monitors for 10+ years. A single high res monitor is so much better ergonomically.
by spiderfarmer 6y ago
I recently switched to a single 6k monitor after using dual monitors for 10+ years. A single high res monitor is so much better ergonomically.
- bosswipe 6y agoEspecially on macOS with its crappy window manager.
- rrrazdan 6y agoUse spectacle app. It's awesome!
- rbinv 6y ago+1 for Spectacle: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/
- JansjoFromIkea 6y agoLove it but important to note "Spectacle is no longer being actively maintained" and it has been like that for over a year
- KORraN 6y agoYup, hence mentioned above Rectangle: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
- jnskw 6y agospectacle is no longer maintained, but the open source alternative rectangle.app works just as well. https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
- Hates_ 6y agoRectangle is an alternative that's actively supported: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
- philjohn 6y agoSpectacle is deprecated, Rectangle is a fork that is still maintained.
- ashraymalhotra 6y agoSpectacle isn't being actively maintained according to their webpage. I use better touch tool (https://folivora.ai/ https://folivora.ai/) for this.
- gimboland 6y ago+1 for BTT, particularly in combination with Karabiner Elements and goku to handle Karabiner configs in a good way. If you like tiling window managers, you can get a very similar experience (in terms of using the whole screen and being able to flexibly throw things all over the place) with this kind of setup.
- sapsan 6y agoRectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/) is Spectacle's successor, works great, and its source is available as well (https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle).
- samatman 6y agoSince everyone is recommending Spectacle/Rectangle, I just want to chime in that I tried that, and Yabai, and ended up settling on Moom. What you can't have is focus follows mouse, however. Moom gets me everything else I want.
- speedgoose 6y agoAre we talking about this one : https://www.apple.com/no/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr https://www.apple.com/no/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr ? You can buy 20 full-hd gaming screens for the same amont of money. Or 12 4K screens. And while they may not look as nice, they have a much better frequency. 60Hz feels laggy.
- mhh__ 6y agoOne thing that's really surprised me is that I bolted my old 60Hz monitor to my current 144Hz and the difference is so bad my eyes almost hurt to look at it. My eyes actually physically struggle with the 60Hz now if I have both in my FoV
- Tepix 6y agoThere are flicker free 60Hz monitors.
- caymanjim 6y agoThat doesn't even make sense. You may be less-susceptible to the refresh rate--many people are--but for someone who notices it, the only solution is faster refresh.
- mkl 6y agoIt makes sense. The rate is the rate at which new imagery can appear on the screen. It says nothing about how much of that 1/60 seconds it's visible, and it could be all of it. By comparison, on a CRT not even all the pixels are lit up at once, so 60Hz on a CRT is unbearable to me (I could bear 75Hz, but 85 was nicer), while on an LCD I'm okay with 60Hz.
- Unklejoe 6y agoLCD's don't refresh like CRTs do. The frame is basically persistent until the next frame comes. What _does_ "refresh" is the backlight in the sense that the brightness is controlled by PWM. However, there are many monitors that use PWM frequencies in the several hundred Hz range, or don't use PWM at all.
- texasbigdata 6y agoWithout windows power toys it’s so much worse workflow wise. Currently running a 49 inch ultra wide at 5k and 2 smaller screens as ancillary. Always losing windows and such. Also, installed an app to allow for more resolution flexibility and 120 hz “feels” so nice but at least my setup only supports 120 hz at max 4K iirc.
- JansjoFromIkea 6y agoYep, I took a punt on a 32" 4K one recently to see if it'd do better than getting a second 27" 2K one (3 screens including the laptop) and I've actually stopped bothering with the laptop screen too. Saves me a big chunk of mental space just knowing everything is (usually) on the one screen. Not defending Apple, it's a pretty clear hardware failing.
- arvinsim 6y agoDo you use yours in native or scaled resolution?
- hashhar 6y ago4K at anything below 43 inch is unusable for text without scaling. 27 inch 2K or 43 inch 4K are the sweet spots. Here's how you can check if your monitor needs scaling: - Find out the DPI of your existing monitor and your desired monitor. For example, 24" 1080p is 91.79, and 27" 4K is 163.18 - Calculate the ratio: 91.79/163.18 = 0.5625 (this means that on the 27" 4K monitor everything is 56% of the size of the 1080p) - Now take a screenshot of your monitor (at 100% scaling) and resize it to 1920x1080*0.5625 = 1080x607. View the resized image at 100%. That text will be the same physical size as on a 4K 27" monitor set to 100%. Without scaling, most people would find text too small on both 27" at 32". You would need a display as big as 40" to get the same density as 1440p on 27" (~110 DPI). For most people, 27" requires 150% scaling and 32" requires 125%.
- vetinari 6y agoThe point is to use scaling; fonts at @2X are much easier to look at than at @1X. Also, your DPI calculation are Windows and Linux specific - they assumed 96 dpi at @1X scale. Mac started with 72 dpi for @1X, so @2X is 144dpi. 27" 4K is slightly above that, thus perfectly usable at @2X scale. For Windows and Linux, it is better to use 150-175%.
- hashhar 6y agoSorry, I should have said PPI (pixels per inch) - as calculated by dividing screen resolution by screen area. Thanks for catching that. The rest of the comment still remains.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoI find a single small size monitor to be superior. I switched from a larger monitor to a smaller one with the same resolution and not having to turn my neck any more was rather pleasant.
- robotmay 6y agoSingle 43" 4K monitor here and I'm not going back to anything smaller in the future. It was a bit of a compromise for me in terms of game performance (I'd have preferred 144hz over 4K really but less than 4K at this size would be poor). For the first time ever I feel like I always have enough screen space. The big advantage over an ultrawide for me is that I have a lot of vertical space, which is great for code. It's basically 4x 1080p displays in a 2x2 grid.
- yurishimo 6y agoWhat monitor do you have exactly? Looking to potentially get one myself.
- robotmay 6y agoI have the LG 43UN700, and I paid about 700GBP at the time, I think. Brief review: I love it. Particularly excellent for photo editing (it's so huge I have to zoom out sometimes) and programming. There is a slight visual oddity on the very outside 1/2px caused by the viewing angle of the pixels out there, which I think they'd only solve by curving it - personally I only even noticed it because a reviewer mentioned it. I also wish all the HDMI ports were 60Hz (2 are, 2 are 30Hz) but that's just a nitpick. I play games on it too and it's generally very enjoyable. It has un-advertised FreeSync support, interestingly, which I find works well with my AMD card under Linux, but it does have a very limited range of like 60-70 I think. There's a different setting on my Linux drivers whose name I can't remember that basically means as long as you're over 60FPS you'll never see any screen tearing, which I can attest works for me with it. The stand is very solid, and the speakers are decent too. I love that it comes with a remote for operating it. It's so much better than using the nubbin under the display. The input splitting modes are really quite good, surprisingly. Being able to display 4 inputs in a 2x2 grid is awesome, although I use a tiling window manager so I don't really use it much. If you were feeling particularly adventurous you could attach 4 inputs from a single machine and it'll recognise it as 4 separate displays :D
- cylinder714 6y agoCheck the reviews on YouTube for the Dell UltraSharp U4320Q.
- jjcm 6y agoPersonally I switched to a 32:9 ultrawide. I use the Samsung CRG9 which I originally bought for gaming. Interestingly I found it to be subpar for gaming (game huds are typically glued to the left and right of the screen, which is so far in your peripheral it's effectively useless on the screen), but I found it amazing for productivity. Having 4 windows side by side has made development so easy. I can have Figma / VS Code / Chrome / terminals all open side by side. It means I almost never have to do window management, whereas with a lot of the apple displays I still find myself only having 2 windows up at once. The DPI leaves some things to be desired, but for real estate it's been unmatched for me.
- pickle-wizard 6y agoI also recently bought a Samsung CRG9. It replaced 2 27" Apple Thunderbolt displays. I bought it because I needed something that had Mac and PC support. Having a curved ultra wide display is much better than 2 smaller displays. I can put my main windows right in the middle of my field of view, and put my reference windows off to the side.
- jaywalk 6y agoBack before I got the CRG9, my dual monitor configuration was to have one directly in front of me, and the other off to the right and tilted towards me.
- jaywalk 6y agoMy experience with the CRG9 mirrors yours exactly. My only complaint productivity-wise is similar to the issue with gaming, because I'm using Windows all of my taskbar icons are shoved over to the left. For the games with HUDs stuck to the sides, I just turn down the horizontal resolution and have black bars on the left and right. But for games like FS2020, using the full display makes the game that much better.
- gurkendoktor 6y agoI'm not a Windows person, but in places where people post screenshots of their dev setups I often see the taskbar icons in the middle, so it seems there is a hack or third-party tool to achieve that. Now if only macOS notifications for important meetings weren't in the top-right corner...
- samatman 6y agoAgreed, I've been using an MSI Prestige PS341WU, which is a so-called 5K2K, so a 4K but wider, and I have no complaints. I use Moom to create three screen regions (there's an undocumented command-line switch to allow a 36-based zone, which I broke up 11-13-11), and it resets everything when I plug in or out. I do have to juke the text magnification for that, which I have on macro keys on my Ergodox. Now if only I could get focus-follows-mouse, everything would be perfect... I've only been complaining about that for fifteen years though, so I'm sure it'll happen one of these days.
- hinkley 6y agoThe first time I ever really felt like 2 monitors was an improvement over one huge monitor was after wide screen monitors were ubiquitous and monitor rotation support was rock solid. These wide monitors are really not very good for watching logs, or other status displays. Rotating a second monitor and dedicating it to showing lots of logs or several rectangular monitoring screens tiled vertically hugely reduced the amount of window management I had to do. In fact I kind of wonder why all my monitors are horizontal again. Probably because horizontal works better for personal computing, or I have my monitors arranged wrong, or both.
- gurkendoktor 6y agoI have a 21:9 ultrawide, not 32:9 or whatever, and it's _also_ the highest screen I've ever had at 3840x1600. Going from 1440px on dual 27" screens to 1600px was really nice for log reading.
- hinkley 6y agoI am fairly certain the only CRT I ever owned as an adult had 1600 vertical pixels. Basically I've been dealing shorter screens for fifteen years. It's nuts. Even now, my laptop defaults my 4k display to 1080p Retina mode. So I get 5 more lines of terminal on my old display, but the text is not as easy to read. I get the same number of lines on the new display if I go down one font point, and it's still more legible. But I'd really love to be able to scroll logs in an 180x160 terminal window, instead of 200x75.