Yes, if you were doing that, almost any change to your environment that stops that will be good. I don't think you'd have to give up your monitor.
Once I realized that in order to answer a single question I needed to Cmd+Tab at least four times, often more, I added two monitors and it’s dramatically lowered my stress level.
FYI, on older MacBooks you can’t add more than one extra screen, but if you get a DisplayLink dongle it works perfectly.
LOL
Im currently typing this on a work issued Macbook thats about 2 years old at this point, and 40% of the time, when I plug in a cable, it decides it wants to turn on and turn off hdmi output in rapid succession.
MacBook Pro M1 Pro or MacBook Pro M5
Sounds like something is really broken in your setup?
On the other hand, sleeping/waking Thunderbolt displays on my ThinkPad with Linux regularly leads to kernel panics, across several kernel versions.
I am never gonna sway away from i3 [1], a notification free tiled window desktop system is just way too convenient. When I have to bootup a Windows VM for work (I am a malware analyst most of the time) I am losing my mind with all the notifications and blocking popup windows all the time. I have no idea why people are tolerating this as their work setup. It is hostile design to its users.
I use my computer to work. I don't want a computer that works me all the time.
[1] for desktop/GUI apps I use a mixture of GNOME forks and LXDE apps. Everything that makes popups when running in the background is avoided.*
counterpoint: this doesn’t appear the case with Apple, as they have defaulted their OS entirely to retina-level density now, removed subpixel rendering, and anything non-5K may look off (and you need to go through hoops to make it look well).
As such, I’m typing this in a MacBook with 3x5K displays connected.
Firefox, MS Edge (my MS Teams sandbox) and any GTK apps do work.
Can't switch because of old hardware and vulkan/mesa legacy reasons.
This is true for programming (where editor = IDE and documentation = API docs for some thing or other), 3d modelling (where editor = CAD software, and documentation = reference drawings, diagrams, etc), and even gaming (where "editor" = Blue Prince, and "documentation" = a gigantic Obsidian vault with all my notes).
In all of those cases, I'm decidedly not multitasking. I have multiple applications running, but they're all contributing to the task at hand. Instead, I find that things having a fixed position in space they live in, and not needing to cmd-tab and find the right window/application are two things that help maintain focus.
Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.
However, I've also learned recently it depends what you're doing.
Software development, I just want one single maximized window on a single laptop monitor. If I have a near-retina DPI monitor with 120hz+ (I can't deal with low DPI fuzziness and low refresh all day) I'll usually have a 3-4 window layout on a single monitor with the IDE taking up half the screen.
There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.
Music production? Man, I could probably use like 3+ monitors. Main stems view, a separate monitor for open VSTs, a separate monitor for video, a separate one for piano roll maybe. The window juggling gets really cumbersome on a single monitor.
My friend who is a professional musician (makes music for TV shows) uses 3 large TVs for music production.
Tiling window managers are a good solution.
If you created a window right now, where will it go? Which window will it take its space from? Does it use your focused window? Your mouse position? If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them? etc. That's all cognitive load when you aren't familiar and still requires some hand control when you are.
The most important thing is to have a way to search through the pile. (Raycast window search is pretty good.)
> If you created a window right now, where will it go?
The new window becomes the focused window. It's inserted into the master position. Existing windows shift down the (conceptual) stack.
> Does it use your focused window?
It uses the same screen space, yes.
> Which window will it take its space from?
All of the other visible windows. It recomputes the tiles so that all tiles except the master become smaller, to make room for the new one.
> Your mouse position?
By default, mouse position is ignored. XMonad is keyboard-centric by design. You can set a mouse-follow configuration variable if you want. I've never tried it.
> If your WM supports mixed floating & tiling, how does it go when you flip a window between them?
It recomputes the tiles in much the same way as above. It's as though you deleted the window from the tiling and it becomes floating. And vice versa. It's a very consistent model.
I find it very natural and predictable. As far as "cognitive load" goes, that seems like an exaggeration, but again I haven't used hyprland.
If by "hand control" you mean using the mouse, that's definitely not needed for window management. In fact by default, XMonad doesn't even support resizing tiles using the mouse, and I've never tried to enable that. I do commonly use the mouse for switching focus, usually because I'm navigating to some location in another window anyway, in which case focus moves automatically.
Do you not feel like there's a similar hit from switching full screen windows? Or is your documentation within your full screen IDE?
I feel like it should be, but in practice it isn't.
Sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but switching between windows on the same screen has near-zero context loss.
I also use a 3x3 grid of workspaces (center one is browser, all the others are dedicated to a single project/context/session/task each), and navigating workspaces (modifier+shift+arrows) also has near-zero contextual hit.
Even more counter-intuitively, while a second screen produces a large and irritating context-switch cost, using a little (physical, pen-and-paper) notepad next to me has even less context-switch loss than switching windows or workspaces do. It happens without me even realising it - sometimes I'd arise from a long session of coding and be surprised at some notes I made while coding.
There's probably something learnable about the human mind in all of this.
Dual 4k 27" monitors on Linux with KDE Plasma near perfect.
I’d say monitor position and ergonomics matter way more than screen size.
Navigating a stack of apps with alt+tab, ctrl+tab is extremely efficient. I only miss the extra space when looking at spreadsheets or comparing things in different windows.
Some laptops have a pitiful screen height, avoid those.
Ultrawide is an extra screen size that many web devs forget about. Good design can take advantage of it. But some fluid designs look terrible without constraints.
I ran a vertical setup, with a monitor above my laptop. Not a bad way to go if you want more space for auxiliary apps.
Focus is essential for productivity. Do whatever it takes to get there.
I'm posting this because it's something I went through in my career and I hope it helps someone who is in a similar situation
I was undiagnosed ADHD until my 30s. In high school and university I was able to brute force my way through and get reasonably good grades. I had a really rocky start to my career in software. I was always getting middling performance reviews along the lines of "You're really good when you're working, but your productivity is terrible". Meanwhile my stress level was crazy high despite not exactly doing lots of overtime or anything else
Even treated, ADHD can make focus very difficult. Undiagnosed, it is devastating
Bringing it back to the words I quoted, I agree entirely. Focus is essential for productivity. Part of doing whatever it takes to get there might mean getting diagnosed and medicated
To me, since I always need to have two apps side by side, a 34" screen have done wonders.
I have my main app as a regular 16/9 window, and the secondary on the side.
By putting the screen at the right distance and height, I don't have to move my head and my eyes just move a little to go through everything on the screen.
And my main window still give me more information than if I had full-screened it on my MBP 14" screen (typically, I can see my whole Jira dashboard on the 34" screen while I have to scroll on the 14").
On the other hand, having two screens (laptop + external) is terrible. Not the same resolution, having to turn the head...
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One thing that is bothering me reading the article: I find the whole clutter on OP's desktop quite distracting!
The cables coming out of the laptop, the things on the wall behind the laptop... That's something that would definitely kill my focus!
At the office and at home, I've put a blank wall/separator in front of me so the only thing in my vision is the screen.
Previously I would be "alt-tabbing" and constantly losing focus. Like stepping through a doorway and forgetting why you came into that room.
My main home office has 5 monitors, and i still have to swipe between desktops regularly. I used to have 6, but two ultrawides stacked one above the other was a bit painful and I developed a back pain after a while.
My on the road setup typically involves a folding portable monitor (asus zenscreen duo, or something to that effect - that is 2x 1080p). Easily enough, and I don't really see a decrease in my efficiency.
But I sometimes do long distance flights and then I code/work on a single screen. I absolutely can do the same thing that I can do with my 6 screen setup with almost not noticeable effect on productivity as well. Could it be that the extra screens are just useless and an illusion of added productivity?
It really depends on what kind of work I'm doing - and if I'm on the plane, I'm going to likely do work that does well single-screen; replying to emails, dicking around on HN, etc.
But in maxscreen mode (or at least two screens) then I'm "doing" something on the main screen while looking at reference material, output, chat, other things on the second.
When I work on frontend I much rather have preview on second screen and most likely reference next to it.
When writing documentation or requirements I cannot imagine working on a single screen as essentially I am integrating multiple data sources into one, like I need to see how app looks now and before release, what changed and still have my working space for draft.
Switching windows to quickly look up documentation is fine but when creating requirements having time to understand what needs to be in which place how it has to evolve I need to have it right there so that my imagination doesn’t runaway.
But overall, I do like the idea that you don't actually have to see everything at once. Also takes focus away I guess. I would love to see a study on this which tries to actually measure this.
I’ve always felt that I can alt-tab 2-3 times per second and that it’s faster to not move my eyes. Why look at docs next to code when I can only read one at a time anyway? It’s also embedded in my muscle memory to switch to specific apps by Apple-space typing 2-3 characters. So Firefox is “Apple-space-fi”. It’s so fast I feel slowed by having apps side-by-side.
Anything that requires me dragging windows to their special place is a non-starter. To me that feels like playing with my food. I wonder if this is just because I type very quickly?
I’m aware I’m in the minority.
I’d like to try a squarish monitor, but it seems to be a barren wasteland of choice: mateview, dualup, or flexscan. Meh.
I normally run applications maximized on my 28" 4k, unless I need input from 2 applications at the same time, then I tile them.
Working from my work-issued 16" Macbook Pro or any other of my laptops is a pain because of the limited estate - it's hard to see patterns at a glance or get the whole context when I can only see 30 lines of text that is truncated at <=80 columns. Plus, the fact that the keyboard isn't detachable from the screen forces bad habits on the posture.
For development, I've always been happy with a 13" screen and nothing else. Not only that, but having all apps in full screen. It brings so much clarity to my mind. Exceptions (because f*ck dogma, right?) have been when I was in charge of monitoring some long-running process, in which case a secondary screen in vertical layout was very useful. Another one was for music making with Ableton Live: 2 screens was much more practical, independently of each individual screen size.
Just because of the setups I've just described, I've been looked at weird, or asked way too much questions. go figure.
A factor in my debilitating back pain for me (was 31 and fit; now 37; getting better) was coping with back pain by moving to unergonomic positions like the couch/bed, which led to different and thus compounding compensations, and thus more complex recovery.
Now if my back is painful in a position, I take it as a signal to move my body, not find another static position that doesn't cause pain.
That can sometimes be difficult to do, with job/family requirements though.
Sorry to derail the post, but I hope this helps someone avoid my issue.
I need to do cross referencing quite a bit, and even with quick iterations in development, I like having documentation and output (terminal, browser...) side by side with Emacs as my IDE (I don't use Emacs' built-in window management as much, but it'd be the same thing).
Using large 16:9 screens ensures I keep enough vertical space compared to ultra-wides, and high res is crucial for smooth text (scaled properly).
The biggest improvement I've found for my focus is to force myself to close any open tabs/windows that are not absolutely necessary roughly every two hours. I used to be one of those people with 800 tabs open in the browser and 20 application windows spread across 8 desktop spaces. Was a concentration mess. Requiring myself to "clean up" periodically has really helped.
Main thing that was contributing to that is Cosmic desktop environment is has amazing defaults and adaptive scaling and if I need two displays just put window in second workspace.
Your secret weapon isnt the laptop. Your secret weapon is a combination of a) actually giving a fuck about what you are doing, and b) the vibe of the workspace that makes you enjoy doing what you are doing.
Focus comes from a reinforcement loop of happy hormones that come from doing what you are doing. You can't focus on things that you don't enjoy doing.
I have an instance of Postman open on my work laptop, and the useful area of the output constitutes maybe 20% of the screen.
Do you just scroll around endlessly every 2 seconds? Or do you have amazing eyesight and use tiny fonts?
Not GP, but I'll be forever thankful to have been able to make my career focused on embedded software.
In my line of work there's nothing to view because there's no visual component at all. If my user(s) "see" the results of my work, then it means I've catastrophically fucked up.
I spend 90% of my time working in vim within XTerm.
The closest I get to UI/UX is a UART debugging interface.
This "rule" is especially useful now that I'm coding primarily through agents. Secret weapon number 2, while everybody else is getting burned out running ten agents at once and producing slop, while I'm now writing more (and better) code than ever.
I tried the big chonkers, but the humble 27" 1440p is unbeatable for me. I'm not being paid enough money to worry about that many pixels.
One virtual desktop is Messages, Slack, and Outlook for all my comms needs.
Another is IDE & browser for development work.
Another is todo list, planner, notes, and browser for task management.
Having to constantly swap app between browser, email, IDE, slack, etc is interruptive. Being able to switch to a single-focus desktop with everything visible is much more productive for me and reduces context switching.
Is the 49" ultra wide or more 16:9/16:10?
Looks like it's 32:9 aspect ratio - it's this Samsung, it was on sale last week for $800: https://a.co/d/0f884LPO
Personally i love a big monitor, i use 32” screens (but only 1 at a time) on my Mac, pc and gaming pc. But in reality i do most ‘real work’ on my 16” mbp. And i drop the res to make everything bigger snd nice to read on the laptop.
* I feel the key message here is "single vs multiple windows", not small vs big monitor. I love my 32" curved monitor. I too switched from having three monitors to having just one big monitor and staying with one maximizing window majority of time.
It's also role dependant. I spent few years as ops manager and multiple windows and situational awareness / task parallelization were important. Not saying it's a good thing but it was the name of the game.
Even without task parallelization, multiple windows are important for some roles. If I'm transforming a working excel into executive slide, it's nice to have them both up. If you are good at taking notes, having teams meeting and one note up is a life saver and super power. Etc
But yes - I think core message is "do not assume that prevalent wisdom or what others do, works for your task, job, and personality". As another example, I think dark mode is cool, all my cool friends use it, and it does not work for me on majority of applications. And that's ok... Not everybody is cool like that :-)
I've switched to Word akin to how I used to do it with Google Docs as that works much better.
Perhaps it's given away by "One" in the name (one simultaneous editor)? Or am I holding it wrong?
I actually redesigned my desk a bit so my ultra wide's left side is directly in front of me to compensate for this, which is a bit weird, but ... it's working so far.
The only thing that does make me wonder at times is that my video in a zoom'ish app looks different than other people's video in some manner, but all that means is that maybe I need 1 backup and mirrored display for video calls, but maybe I can live with it.
You working out? PT?
After reading the first sentences, I knew this was going to come up. I have an ultrawide screen but never watch videos next to my work. It just doesn’t work. When I’m working, I want to be productive. Somehow it’s also really bad for the brain to put things side by side as anyone I know who does this has poor focus
- 11in Macbook Air
- 16in Macbook Pro
- 1 X 27in monitor mounted with MB Pro in clamshell mode
- Linux Mint desktop on old Dell Inspiron with 4gb of RAM
and after using all of these to try and increase my productivity, I'm still an unfocused and possibly ADD riddled human. I'm not cut from the same cloth as my other productive peers who do not watch much YouTube and can type away at a black `vim` terminal on one half of their screen with software documentation on the other half of the screen.
What stops you? Have you tried ripping the bandaid off, putting documentation on one screen and vim on the other? Putting your cellphone in a drawer across the room? Pulling the plug on your router if need be?
With Xmonad I had 10 spaces on a single laptop screen (actually however many I wanted) with the flick of a button. And yes, I know about hacks like aerospace and the others that require disabling system integrity
27" @ WQHD res seems just about right. 4K if you absolutely must.
I wouldn’t use a display from this close. It’s better for my eyes to have a larger display a little further away. I’m closer to 30” with a 32” and another desk with a 38”
> but for people who read, code, do productive stuff, it's too much screen, too much pixels.
I do all of those things and find the opposite. So it would seem it’s more down to individual preference.
> WQHD res seems just about right.
I would dislike this. Especially for text and even more at closer distances.
Set the default window width to 1/4 or 1/3 of the screen width (depending on the screen size) and it's easy to keep just the right context visible.
I do wish it had virtual outputs though. Such that we can either combine screens to form a big monitor, or subdivide a screen to make multiple outputs. I have been doing some coding on a 42" OLED tv, and I really want both a side tray and an overhead output. There's stilch which does this; I wonder if River is capable enough to do something similar. https://github.com/wegel/stilch
Going to try not plugging the monitor at all, it might save my sleep.
Imagine sitting through those lengthy team calls and having to concentrate on BS for 1-2 hours.
Nah, I’d rather focus on getting things done in the meantime.
A different angle: multiple screens can cause neck problems if you’re tilting your head in a weird direction for too long
Still keep a second monitor around, but it's exclusively for screen sharing. Speaking of, having a dedicated monitor for sharing is really nice:
- It can have a standard resolution and aspect ratio (1080p) which is perfect for sharing
- It is a clean slate. I only share stuff I consciously move to that monitor. No need to clear my screen or burden my colleagues with unrelated windows in our call.
- Yes app sharing exists, but screen sharing is just more reliable and works better for sharing multiple things sequentially/simultaneously.
That's why I highlighted GNOME getting usable fractional scaling out of the box, it makes all the difference. Previously I relied on the large text accessibility feature, but toggling it on/off depending on what monitor I used was a pain.
I use one 24 inch monitor with my laptops, and keep all the interruptions like Messages/Signal and Mail on the smaller screen. Nothing else generates notifications.
It's a matter of discipline,that's all.
For years, I resisted even using an external monitor, preferring to work on my laptop's monitor instead. I finally switched to using a monitor when poor posture started getting uncomfortable.
I almost always have just one window on the screen, maximized. I'm also using virtual desktops to switch between the browser/app and the IDE. This kind of setup really helps me with the focus, but at the same time it's not too annoying.
I used to just use the macOS virtual desktops, but with the Apple Silicon transition, they also added annoyingly slow animation for desktop switching. That can not be turned off (seriously, wtf, Apple?). I jumped to FlashSpace the second I found about it.
That said, shout out to the well being app that comes with the latest gnome version! I allow it to force me to get up and walk around for five minutes at awkward times. I do light exercises like push ups and australian pull ups or get coffee while I wait. Being forced off the computer while I'm trying to focus actually makes the day more interesting.
I use a 32" monitor and I find that I use only the center of the screen. I would downsize if not for vertical real estate.