Tuesday, 17 August 2004
Working in stereo
Listening to:
Louis Armstrong meets Oscar Peterson.
I’ve just had a second display linked up to my computer, so that
I’m now working with a logical screen that is twice as wide as it used to
be. (xdpyinfo thinks my screen has logical dimensions 2560x1024 pixels.) It’s pretty strange to be typing this on the second display, which
I have off to the right, and at a slight angle. I think I’ll keep one of
the screens straightahead of me, and that this will be the primary work display.
But another option would be to have them in a straight line in front of me,
and with the little gap between them to be straight ahead of my eyes.
...
Hmm, I don’t know about it this way ’round either. I guess I’ll just have to try to do some extensive work and see what my
eye-brain-hand-mouse-keyboard system makes of it.
It’s definitely cool though.
Have you got used to it yet?
Do the screens one logical desktop smeared across two screens, or as two desktops?
I've got two screens (laptop + 2nd screen) running as two desktops. I reckon it's fantastic - it's easy to conceptually separate work on two different destops.
I can separate, e.g. document editing in one, and reference searching in the other. (Or, e.g. separate programming and debugging, not that I do much of that these days.)
I seem to remember that a second screen can increase programmer productivity around 15% - I'm not sure it's quite that high over the whole day, but it's a definite improvement, and it would certainly pay for itself pretty quickly.
Yeah, I have one desktop across two physical screens. But I also have two virtual desktops (each containing one big wide screen), so that I have four screens’ worth of space to put windows on. This seems to work quite well: as you say, it’s nice to split things up.
I also decided to go with one screen directly in front of me, and the other off to one side (the right) and at an angle. The other approach, of having them both at ninety degrees to my line of vision, didn't seem so comfortable. The “resting” position for my eyes ended up being the gap between the two screens, and this didn’t feel so good.
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