tl;dr: Your mileage may vary, but I find I work best on a small screen, light weight hardware, in a layered environment with semi-transparency. I used to be a

tl;dr: Your mileage may vary, but I find I work best on a small screen, light weight hardware, in a layered environment with semi-transparency. I used to be a big proponent of "more screens = more efficiency." There was a time when I was developing/running/debugging on a rather large network of in situ oceanographic sensors when I had four monitors arranged in a 2x2 grid. Since then I was forced into working on some small, low-res displays in some cramped/uncomfortable environments. There's nothing like being afraid of heights and debugging code at the top of a swaying hydraulic scaffolding to make you want lightweight, productive efficiency. I migrated to using yakuake, and now iTerm2 in a quake-like setup, and I do most of my coding in vim. I set the terminal and vim to the solarized-dark color scheme, and set the background at 80% opacity. I find this allows me to focus on what I'm doing but still "peer" through to see reference material behind the terminal. Further, because the terminal rolls down from the top with the press of a hot-key, I find that transitions between browsing/etc and writing code are very fluid and the burden of a mental context switch is minimized. This setup allows me to be incredibly productive on a 13" rMBP. I recently had the opportunity to switch back to a multimonitor setup. I found that I spent too much time worrying about how things were tiled to make appropriate use of the real-estate, and began to wonder why I ever craved four monitors. In the end I just went back to my normal quake-like terminal/vim usage pattern as I feel this helps me focus better, and I really like the feeling of not being tethered to my desk/chair.