this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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I'm pretty judgemental of people who use more than one screen. Do you not have hotkeys to jump between bookmarked parts of your buffers? Is momentarily splitting a screen between two programs so difficult? Does Alt-Tab simply not exist in your universe?
The judgement continues.
What? Are you an actual developer.
It’s pure insanity to work like you suggested. Sure it can be done, I used to work on a Mac and had no monitors but it wastes time switching between displays.
I’ll work with 2-3 monitors.
If it two then I’ll have my IDE on one and if I’m working on UI then I have the application open on the other. That way I change some CSS, save and glance left to see how it looks now. If I’m not doing UI work and I’m working on the server then my other monitor is used for the spec document, SQL server management and just web browsing.
On a three monitor setup then the third one would be where I would keep my email client open with teams.
I am literally at a loss for words with your weird take.
On Linux, using AwesomeWM bindings:
I have many more bindings, but these are the main ones and probably the only one's I will ever need
If I need to do something concurrently I will split my focus between two tasks and no more.
If I need to edit a UI with code, I do Caps+E, do my edit, then Caps+D and refresh the UI.
I'm literally a finger away from everything, and my head does not need to move from center.
Hey you do you bro I’m not about to tell you how to do your shit, but I think the consensus here is pretty clear.
Anyways if it works for you then no harm no foul, just seems counter to anybody I’ve ever interacted with that’s a developer. (That’s sounds like I’m saying you’re not, and I don’t mean it that way.).
You're so kewl
Thank you! It's not often that users on Lemmy reply with such openness and honesty, instead of hiding behind the skirt of sarcasm
It was a bit tongue in cheek I know. I have a very similar setup, but why being judgemental with such a simple thing? It seems like a waste of time and energy. You need those to tweak the setup instead.
Cos. Superiority complex. No true hacker should need more than a harddrive and a needle to flip bits to do what they need to do in a pinch
You may find the need for 3 different aspect ratios, just to be sure you're doing the whole user interface thing right. Judge if you like but here I still need to have multiple workspaces and stacked windows, so clearly the extra retail space works. Or its obnoxious and I'm merely coping.
Also fuck games that still dont work with alt tab in this day and age
There are games like that? The only games that don't like it I find are the old computer games that are already troublesome to run on a modern Windows machine
Oh dont even get me started on modded Minecraft, I'm really not sure what makes it worse for alt tabbing over just older versions, maybe its just selection bias, but it's like one mod can decide that it no longer wants to go fullscreen, and I don't think its fabric/forge
KSP was another one that was just kinda finicky, I think it got better with patches
There needs to be a list for games that don't like you alt-tabbing out of them so people can avoid
I'm an architect. It's nice having the project I'm actively working on always active on one screen, with design sketches, marked up revisions, email with comments from client, renderer etc. active on the other. Sure it only saves a second not having to tab back and forth, but if you're doing it non stop all day it makes a big difference. Also just less effort.
I guess I can see for more UI oriented stuff how it can be useful to have on persistent graphic window
Just because you can work with one monitor doesn't mean multiple monitors isn't more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.
I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.
A glance to the side is much faster and easier than pressing physical buttons
You can see stuff with your peripheral vision. With alt-tab, you don't see if anything is happening at all
Alt-tab is linear, screens are 2d
You can't tile absolutely everything unless your screen is huge and has very high resolution, at which point it turns into rich people's version of multi-monitor setup, since a bunch smaller screens are much cheaper than single big one
Alt-tab list changes constantly. But some apps are likely to be constantly there, you can throw them on separate screens and unclutter the main one by doing so
Alt-tab was my very last use-case because I literally have bindings to pull up my main programs.
As someone who has gone from tiling(i3), to floating (stump), to tiling again (i3/sway), and finally back to floating (awesome) - I can say floating wins in terms of predictability. You press a button to focus on your desired window and your entire desktop does not need to convulse to accommodate for it.
Floating window managers win on speed and predictability, and I'm wondering now if this is causing the rift in single/multi monitors in this discussion chain.
I didn't really mean "tile" as in tiling WM, more like that if you're this type of guy, then you could just just put everything you'd ever need somewhere on one screen, never maximize anything, and then nothing's ever going to be out of sight.
My setup is mostly static, with 6 screens, so I rarely even switch windows on screen. I've got top-left for whatever is making sounds - music, movies, youtube, etc. Top-right is for the stock charts. Left is for comms - I've got all chats tiled up in there, but if I'm in the videocall I'll fullscreen that, or, if I'm focusing, I put documentation and references there. Middle for IDE, right for the app I'm working on and a front-end debugger. There's also bottom screen for a back-end debugger, a live database view and a small log tail. Top two screens are stationary that I only use at home, so I don't need them when I'm out working. The rest are set up so that I don't ever have anything important out of view. It's exceptionally good when I'm debugging - I can see, live, absolutely everything that's going with the app, from rendered page down to db data, click through steps and instantly see what happens where. It also saves me some time, as with one screen I would sometimes forget I was debugging after doing something different in IDE, and then wonder why tf is my app not responding. With debug always open this is never the case. I also set up win+WASD to jump between windows by direction, which in most cases means jumps between screens, so win+w - space would stop whatever is making a noise. When I'm off work, I usually surf or game on my middle screen, tops stay the same, so does the left, bottom switches to PC performance metrics, and right usually has something that controls the PC itself, like fan curves or sound mixer. Surely I could do with a single screen, and I actually went single-multiple-single-multiple before. The second cycle really taught me some window discipline. On the first go at multi-screen I got a short boost of productivity but then fell into a pit where I would have stuff all over the place, constantly switching and leaving apps forgotten on others. It wasn't until after returning to single that I've realized exactly what I want out separated and consistent in one place.
Did you seriously set up awesome as a floating window manager? You monster! Jk, do whatever fits you
Ah I see what you mean by tiling. Still, such a setup feels... excessive, no? I can completely understand that you literally never need to pull up anything since it's all just there, but I dunno (I'm reaching here) doesn't your machine get hot from all the displays and forcing all screens to do constant screen updates?
It just seems unneccesary to me (like I said, I'm judgemental on this front). When you have to travel, you can't take all that with you -- so working on a laptop at the airport must be incredibly frustrating if you're used to things just being there, no?
Haha, yes, the other layouts are wasted on me. Ideally a dwm desktop would suit me fine, but I enjoy the Lua extensibility.
It is excessive yes, but I'm all about going above and beyond, sort of say. It doesn't really get hot since it doesn't update if there's nothing to update - I've checked in the driver. Actually an error in said driver might have put an end to my windows journey on this machine, as some bug was causing all screens to not refresh unless there was any app doing a draw somewhere. It does use quite a bit of VRAM, though(~1.5 gigs) but that doesn't matter when I'm working as I turn off the dGPU and the iGPU uses RAM which I have plenty. I used to just grab this machine and go to the nearest restaurant with poor internet(less distractions) and focus on work until the battery dies, and I've consistently got 2-2.5 hours off.
I do travel with it. It is a bit frustrating, yes, but as mentioned, the quad-screen setup is portable and I can pull it even in an airport given enough space. The problem is TSA, they used to not give a damn about laptops, but the last time I moved, they forced everyone to take out laptops and turn them on, at every one of the 4 airports I went through. But I had like 5 on me: My personal one w/extra screens, a corporate issued one as a spare, a tiny laptop that I used to carry in my pocket which saved me quite a few times, and also a colleague asked me to grab his laptop and iPad to pass off to his relatives. All this, along with a few HDD's, was just enough to fit into a carry-on bag. But checkpoints were all something like:
5 minutes later
I could've saved myself trouble and put all them into a checked baggage, but since I was moving through some totalitarian dictatorship states, I'd rather have all the data close to me rather than have it pulled out and searched without my consent, which they are likely to do given that they forced people to hand off unlocked phones for search before.
Well it sounds like your desktop is pretty scalable - no matter how many monitors - so that's pretty good.
And hah yeah, it might be worth investing in a badge that reads "Hi, I'm an IT specialist, this all normal" and pinning it on your shirt before you enter customs