Peripheral vision helps with anchoring where and what something is. If what I'm looking at suddenly changes to something else, there's a moment of disorientation, too brief to react to, but still enough to interrupt my train of thought. If pressing cmd+tab didn't actually produce the very next thing I needed to see, this is even worse, since now I need to consciously decide if what I'm looking at is the right thing, press cmd+tab again, wait until I understand what I'm looking at, etc. I feel confident that this is not a problem unique to me, due to the existence of extensions like https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=johnpapa... , which colors window borders differently to allow reducing this delay.
If I turn my head to look at a window that I could vaguely see in the edge of my vision, there's no such disruption, at least consciously. It feels as though turning my head doesn't require any conscious attention at all, unlike the "what am I looking at? Is this what I expected? What was I thinking?" process that happens with hidden-to-visible transitions. By the time my head has turned to bring the window on the other monitor into the center of my vision, I already have the visual context, and in the meantime, I haven't lost my train of thought.
Imo. it comes down to the window manager, with regards to productivity.
One ultra wide (I got the Dell 38") has the added benefit of making it possible to have the primary app in the center, with less important stuff occupying the far ends of the screen.
That's my setup, 3 vertical 24" monitors. Same benefit as having the 'main' thing in the middle on a big screen. Text editor takes up the full middle display at most times, a terminal (or stack of terminals) to the left for compiling / examining debug output, and the rightmost display is for hacker news. I look at the rightmost display too often.
In all seriousness the tiling window manager I use (xmonad, but any other would probably do) is more important than the number of displays I have. But it is nice to be able to use 2 vertical displays side by side to do an eyeball diff of output at times, or to keep reference material visible on the display right by the code I'm working on.
So much more has to do with window managers, software choices, etc than simply the number of pixels you have on your display(s). I find that reading long lines of code is more comfortable on my 1920x1200 Dell desktop monitor than on my ThinkPad’s 1366x768, but my productivity has a lot more to do with the WM and Emacs configuration than number of monitors.
1. Sample size of three people (one per monitor arrangement).
2. A 25" 21:9 ultrawide is not comparable with 2x 24" 16:10 screens. You'd need something like a 44" ultrawide to get the same screen width (omitting bezels)
Indeed it's not as wide as 2 monitors, but you can split workspace into 2 applications and that's still quite comfortable. E.g. when working on web-development you might have VS-code and browser opened at the same time.
I know what you mean, I have used 34" and 38" UWs and they feel large enough. But a 25" UW is tiny and actually has 12.59% less space [1] than a single 24". And most run at just 2560x1080.
Went from two 27” thunderbolt displays that were side by side, to two Dell 38” stacked on top of each other. With the bottom monitor closer to the desk and the chair a bit higher, my eyes are at the top center of the bottom monitor and I’ve noticed my head doesn’t go back and fourth and my eyes can cover the vertical space pretty easily.
Looking forward to some high dpi 38” monitors over the next few years.
I would be a little concerned about the ergonomics - any slight deviation from the heads central balancing point on the neck (i.e. looking slightly up or down) over a longer period can cause neck strain with the associated problems.
The ideal position of a monitor is with the top directly in front of your eyes when your head is perfectly upright.
That said you obviously don't have to turn your head as much, which might make up for that.
Yeah I used to have a 2-28" side by side with a top 28" on arms and I really didn't like it. It caused constant neck pain no matter how I adjusted my seating position and I wound up rarely even using the top monitor. I initially figured I'd just keep spotify/media on it
Back to 2-28s now. Debating on getting 1 49" but I'm worried I'll miss having two completely separated monitors.
There seemed to be an assumption that someone on a single monitor would tend to use the whole screen for a particular program. So this might be specific to a particular, undefined, windowing environment.
Notably missing from this study is any note of the display resolution. The market is flooded with a glut of 22-26" monitors that have the same low resolution as the smaller ones they are supposedly designed to replace.
This is all also really dependent on the applications you run. I'm personally stuck running a CRM and remote control programs that open new windows for everything. 1 large high-resolution display + heavy use of macOS workspace seems like the best way to deal with it, though my colleagues all prefer 2 displays. Anecdotal observation indicates that none of us can easily find the window we were just looking at once we move away from it, so I think the window manager needs work too.
Ideal window manager for me would be a 2-tier affair were at the top-most tier I would create task specific groups. Each group itself would work something like the linear sequence of the OS X spaces.
>> The market is flooded with a glut of 22-26" monitors that have the same low resolution as the smaller ones
The 27/30" inch monitors that are only 1080 make no sense to me. Maybe if you have really bad vision. I love my LG 4K and would like a 27" 5K but they're expensive. The text is so sharp on those things.
But, for a 21" monitor that is only 1080, if you're using multiple ones, you can sit back far enough away to be able to see 4 of them and not have the text unreadably small.
The younger guys at work like 25" 2560x1440 monitors and just run 8 point fonts, my vision was never very good so I could never use that for more than a few minutes. I'm using a pair of 27" monitors but I do end up turning my head a lot. I'd like to try a 3840x1440 screen.
We have a couple Steelcase 'collaboration tables', some with 1 40-something inch TV and some with 2 slightly smaller ones. They basically look like this:
They are very nice to use for a few hours. My theory is that with the screen being 3-4 feet away from your eyes, your eyes are very relaxed. Watching TV vs reading a book.
This is despite the fact that they are only 1080 resolution. I'm sure we could stick 4K screens in there but I'm not sure how much more useful the resolution would be at 40".
I don't even understand the 27" 2560x1440 things that seem to be most trendy in the recent years. I tried one for a couple of days and couldn't make it work. Without scaling things are too tiny, but for a reasonable scaling that doesn't take too much quality away the resolution is simply too low. 27" 4k is a lot better, and looks ok at about 175% scaling. However I'm really looking forward to 5k and above getting more mainstream, so that we finally get good quality (like the Macbook screens) for desktops.
I live-stream code sessions with OpenBroadcasterStudio. I use one monitor for my work and the other to monitor the stream. On the work monitor, I split the window evenly between editor and output (web browser with browser tools), and find the OS shortcuts for arranging the windows to align to the edges and split the screen really helpful for efficient use of the screen space.
> Naturally, when working with two monitors, you have to turn your head more often. [...] Therefore, while working on 2 monitors may require massages or physical exercises to reduce neck strain, one monitor is lean and mean.
My personal experience is the opposite. With just one screen I tend to sit still in one position for long periods at a time and feel really uncomfortable after a couple hours. With my current 3 monitor setup I not only turn my head frequently but even sit differently depending on which screen currently has main focus and which one is e.g. just showing debug info or logs.
Nice to see some quantification and hints of where the point of diminishing returns is reached. Counting tab/window switching time and neck moves seems like a decent start, tho seems moving the neck or chair is quicker.
It's been obvious since the CRT days that the biggest possible monitor was best. Anything smaller was like trying to navigate through a porthole instead of the broad seascape visible from the bridge.
The ultimate in some SciFi scenes, a large curved desk-monitor surround, though past the point of diminishing returns for most tasks, still seems cool for very complex tasks, or large CAD work...
I've been using 6 x 1920x1200 displays for several years - 5 x 24" plus the laptop's own 15" panel [1] in a corner configuration with 3 in portrait orientation (perfect for reading documents and web pages).
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I'm so used to being able to distribute 'tasks' and workflow to specific monitors that I struggle terribly, to the point of giving up in frustration, when having to use a single display for anything other than casual or single application use.
I use a combination of head movement and rotating the chair depending on task.
The outstanding benefit is to have multiple applications and documents open and readable simultaneously, just as I would with multiple physical reference books.
An added benefit is having the same 'book' (document) open at different 'pages' on different monitors - and not need to flick back and forward between 'pages' or tabs.
This is using GNU/Linux Xorg server with 4 X sessions.
[1] Dell XPS with ExpressCard -> PCIe ViDock extender containing an Nvidia NVS420 driving 4 monitors, the laptop panel, and an HDMI connection, all 1920x1200.
Mostly bug-hunting and coding in unfamiliar code bases so I need a lot of resources instantly available in front of me to compare and figure out relationships.
However, it does make remote sys-admin safer too in that I can assign remote hosts to specific monitors - avoids the risk of accidentally issuing commands to the wrong target!
I don't understand this - you think rotating moving your chair is less effort than clicking alt/command + tab. And you struggle terribly - wtf are you talking about. Struggle to do what exactly, press alt tab ?
Yes, I'm a developer I have n putty sessions etc, etc.
With 6 monitors I think I'd struggle to remember what was on each screen and have my head and eyes constantly scanning around! Kind of reminds me of those people that run Windows with no less than 42 shortcuts on their desktop!
"The outstanding benefit is to have multiple applications and documents open and readable simultaneously, just as I would with multiple physical reference books."
It isn't really "simultaneously, though, right? Unless each eyes can somehow look at different screens and a brain that can handle processing that. There's a good argument for peripheral awareness helping, though.
So the real question is: is it quicker to turn your head (with multiple monitors), or not turn your head and use a key bind to switch between screens (on the same monitor)?
Furthermore, if someone determines that multiple monitors is best, then one cannot discount the fact that a single larger monitor with a cleverly setup windows manager could not out compete it... At least based on the lack of physical space separating the monitors.
I would also like to try a curved monitor, but I doubt it will be as good for text-based applications.
So I've had both large single and 3-monitor systems for many years. I still cannot tell which is better.
This makes a lot of sense. Going from two monitors to ultrawide, I miss the easy context switch of swapping between monitors. Being able to compartmentalize different tasks to different monitors is practically ingrained in my DNA at this point.
I've come to love single monitors. It is like a task mode for me where I'm only looking at one thing at a time. I use multiple desktops to quickly change between applications or views. It really removes a lot of the urge of distraction for me.
How about two vertical monitors? I use a laptop and normally also have connected two 27″ monitors, both vertically oriented, above it. There are certain code tasks that really benefit from the increased height of vertical orientation; as an example, last week I was doing some substantial rebasing, and the increased vertical height in a four-way diff was invaluable. Most of the time I find I’m actually using at most one of the external displays, but it’s definitely still common to get practical value out of both of them. Referring to web pages or other documents on vertical screens is also normally better—mostly normally because they’re half the DPI of my laptop display.
(The slight off-centring of the laptop in this diagram is also curiously realistic; early on, a couple of years ago, I had it centred; but a few weeks ago I looked closely at where it had ended up, and found that I consistently placed the laptop definitely right of centre, and favour the right-hand monitor to the left.)
A few others in the company use one or more vertical screens too. Those of us who do, certainly like the increased vertical space.
Quality of window management is also going to be an important factor: of the two main OSes: Windows is good at simple window-per-screen and two-tiled-windows-per-screen arrangements; macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it. (I’m on Windows for now, but I’m planning on trying Arch Linux, which I previously used, on my Surface Book, as it’s now probably good enough to work with. With Sway (i3 clone for Wayland), its handling of such a screen arrangement will be superb.)
So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe).
It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.
I'd like a citation here. Keeping your headed tilted at an odd angle for months is ergonomically unsafe. Head motions? I've never seen studies that motion was unsafe, so long as the neutral position was neutral. Indeed, all I've seen suggests you want to move and stretch more.
The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.
Parent never described how it made them feel -- they described the motions they made, and called that not ergonomically safe. If op has said "I got a kink in my neck," it'd be a different story.
That's actually a perfectly legitimate thing to ask for. Our feelings and subjective experiences are very real, but our recall of them is terrible. Properly tracked, they're useful data, and such tracking could be cited here. Summoned up from memory, they're noise.
> The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk.
That’s because it is bunk. Low back pain researchers found ages ago that the most ergonomic setup for alleviating back pain was the one that let you shift positions every 15 minutes or so. There is no position so ergonomic that the body can tolerate holding it for extended periods of time.
I have a setup similar to GP’s except with a horizontal monitor between the two vertical monitors. The part of my desk holding the monitors is physically separate from the part my keyboard rests on so I can sit as close or as far away as I like. I tend to sit father back than I do with my gaming rig which is a single curved ultra wide. Probably better on my eyes. Most of my work is on the horizontal screen. Vertical screens are typically used for referencing information or if I use them heavily for other purposes I tend to have windows at the same level of as the horizontal screen.
This is specially the case when you are bound to use glasses. Just moving the eyeballs up is not enough, you have to move the head a lot. I use three horizontal 24' monitors and find it almost ideal. I could use one more stacked vertically where I place some windows which I glance at less often than a minute or so, like a grid of tmux panes containing logs.
Perhaps the problem you've experienced is with the 16:9 monitors that were forced on everyone a ~half decade back. Or rather 9:16 in this orientation. I still (barely) prefer them vertical, but it is true they are not optimal either.
I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.
I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.
I have a Surface Studio as my main work monitor and two vertical 16:9 monitors I keep terminals and documents on. It's great for editing code and having windows side by side. I think we may seem a little bit of a resurgence of the 3:2 aspect ratio, but that maybe be wishful thinking.
So I’ve tried vertical monitors and I find them to be very unergonomic. Your head naturally moves from the top of the monitor to the bottom. What I find this results in is too much head movement and half the time your neck is tilted more than it should be (ie more than is ergonomically safe)
Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)
The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.
That will depend a little on the window management techniques employed. For me, it works very well, and I would actually consider a seamless blend of the two displays to be a slight regression, given Windows’ automatic snap behaviour or i3-like layout.
But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)
I tried this before and my neck was sore for a week. It was really really painful. I’ve basicslly given up on dual monitors in general, give me one 27” 5K (iMac) monitor and I’m happy.
I found that the most problems are for the eyes, if the monitors take too much of your FOV. I worked in the past with 8 monitors and after a while it really impairs my ability to focus far away. Luckily it seems reversible after several months, especially if you spend a lot of time outside looking far away.
You can place monitors at different distances from your eyes. Screen resolution can be changed to maintain perceived relative size of onscreen objects.
For eye health, have the monitors backing a window (or 20+ feet of empty space), so that you can periodically (at least every 20 minutes) look past the monitors at an "infinite" plane.
It’s not practical in an open office with everything standardised. Sure in an Home Office you can do pretty much what you want if you have enough space.
I brought my own clamp-on monitor arms to the open office I work in and installed them myself without asking anyone. You might be able to get away with the same.
You can at least position the laptop closer than the monitor, which gives you two focal planes. In an open office, there should be many "distant" objects to use as a temporary third focal plane.
Triple for me. Have an Ergotech stand with the extra wide arm. In the middle sits a 21:9 34" 3440x1440, then on each side floating in the air a 16:10 24" 1920x1200.
Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.
Recently switched from spectacle to amethyst. So far I'm happy. Every now and then it bugs out and you need to restart it, but in general I spend less time adjusting window positions.
It really only makes sense on large screens though. If you spend a lot of time on the laptop screen overlapping windows + spectacle is better.
If you’re on windows, display fusion is a top notch window manager, it gives a single button to span wide across all screens for time when you want on window to rule them all.
What is the point of a 4-way diff? I never used a rebase workflow and I always merge. When merging you compare the common ancestor with the two different branches, and it’s the perfect use case for a three monitors setup with the three-way diff. From what I understand rebasing is pretty much the same but it rewrites history to have a single branch. Why you would need a 4-way diff in a rebase instead of a 3-way diff?
If you want to see what changed between two versions you are merging (both without your changes), your currently in progress merge, and your current version before you started merging.
I recently switched to a landscape 28" 3K monitor as my main monitor, with a portrait 24" monitor as secondary - I've found this arrangement suits me really well. I typically have a console window open in the lower half of the portrait monitor, then something else in the top half depending on what I'm doing (maybe unit tests window, or a DB admin tool, whatever)
Yeah, and that's even the hero image of this article with no mention. I find having a secondary monitor in portrait is great. Laptop is primary, but the portrait is great for reading. Also, for debugging for mobile.
Two portrait, one landscape (actually all the same size, which i couldn't be bothered to do in the diagram, sorry); one window maximised on the landscape, and each portrait tiled with two windows.
It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.
To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.
But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.
Some of us will change our entire lifestyle just to find reasons to donate screen space to live data streams for no reason other than that it looks cool and satisfies our deep-seated nerd fantasies.
I have 3x 39" 4K TV's as my monitors. As Shown in the above, I use them as the equivlant of 6x ultra-talls.
I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.
Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.
I have 1x 43" 4K monitor (Dell P4317Q), and together with a tiling WM it's pretty awesome as you say. It's more expensive (I think $800), not sure if it's sufficiently better as to be worth it.
I have the same (single) monitor and love it. $699 at MicroCenter.
I like to sum up this debate like this:
With multiple monitors, you're confined into smaller, "hard-coded" boxes that can't be changed. With a single large screen you have much more flexibility.
You need extra functions in your window manager for moving between screens with multiple monitors. Depending on their placement the shortcuts might be non-intuitive. Different screen resolutions lead to unnatural movement of the mouse cursor between screens.
I've also found that such extra complexity impacts productivity negatively. It's an unnecessary distraction trying to communicate such complicated layouts.
Yes! I have the same and despite spending thousands of dollars trying to find a better monitor it's still best solution I've found. I can keep 4x80 column files open in vscode or 8 if I split them vertically. And with a single monitor I can still easily use a KVM switch.
I'm just using a 27" 5K iMac, BUT sometimes I change its resolution from the default, virtually 2560x1440 one to the highest DPI, which I guess is the native 5120x2880 and I just pull it closer and/or lean closer to it.
I think for programming the 2560/1600 = 1920/1200 = 1.6 or the 3000/2000 = 1.5 ratio is a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately it's not a common ratio among big but cheap monitors...
The extra head movement required to look into the corners of a 27" or even a 25" vertical monitor definitely puts a little strain on my neck compared to a 25" horizontal one, but with frequent posture changes and breaks, while a bit tiring, I don't feel it caused any permanent damage.
At least I hope it's not the reason why the middle of my upper back feels like falling apart any minute... Maybe that thai massage, when a lady was walking on my back for half an hour was a bit too much? :D
Please pardon my comment with limited background knowledge but are you sure that TVs, with their hardware designed to make you look from far are a good idea to keep close to your eyes?
I started with one 46", then I switched to an OLED tv which unfortunately only come in 55". I love the OLED quality though and I'll never go back to regular monitors.
How far away are they? That's a lot of physical space to cover.
I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.
But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.
they sit about 2' to 3' from me, just like a normal monitor.
it's only about 2' of vertical space, but 8' of horizontal, so I have them laid out in a semi-circle.
I have 39" seiki TV's, all about 4 years old now. As one of the other posters mentioned, it actually seems rare to find any 4K TV that small any more. But a brief search on amazon shows you can still get stuff in that price range, but Seiki seems to be gone :(
At three foot, you have a circumference of 18foot. The idea of almost 180° of monitors still unsettles me. That's beyond neck work, that's practically into separate workspaces. If you're looking at the left side of Monitor 1, Monitor 3 is physically out of —even peripheral— eyeline.
I don't know why I'm flapping on about it. If it works for you, that's great.
you are right that 3 monitors is excessive. I find myself only really using 2 of them.
Using the 3rd requires me to twist my upper body a bit uncomfortably. as a result I find that I tend to keep it dedicated to little used apps, like email and sourcetree (a git gui)
Most TVs have some weird effect where it just puts white dots in the middle of the strokes of a charater glyph.
However, I've seen several Samsung TVs which doesn't suffer from this phenomena and can be used as proper monitors.
For coding purposes I don't think color accuracy matters much, but I see why latency might annoy some people, though it doesn't bother me.
macOS has terrible native window management, but there are a number of window manager programs that are as good as what's available on Linux. BetterTouchTool is my favorite.
Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB).
Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.
In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.
I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.
I've become quite fond of Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst). Especially it's 3Column Middle Wide layout in combination with swapping windows using the mouse and mouse pointer being placed in the middle of a switched-to window have been godsents for my daily workflows.
TL;DR : if you want to mount monitors vertically side-by-side, try before you buy.
One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.
That sounds weird, so let me explain:
LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).
Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.
But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.
It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.
I used to have 2 monitors side by side turned vertically. The problem for me was that the rotation was down in software in the video driver and many redraws were noticeably slower. It was long ago though (2007 ish), maybe modern performance makes it unnoticeable.
The other issue I've noticed is the (polarizing?) filter built into monitors seems to be oriented for landscape viewing only. So when you have screens in portrait, there's no perfect viewing angle that lets you see all the way left to right on the screen surface, without the filter obscuring one of the sides.
> macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.
I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.
I love my 43" 4K monitor not because he just wide, he also does give me much more verical space. I don't sit in the center, I sit about 1/3 on the left side.
I love mine as well. To me it is working with Windows the way it was envisioned, where you can place documents and tools where you want them as you would on a desk. You can even see your "desk" (wallpaper) in the space between documents. I shove my calendar and chat up high where I can easily see them, but they are out of my way.
One display is also no muss, no fuss. The time wasted on fiddling with displays, layouts and dealing with OS (oh Windows..) issues can negate the benefits of multiple monitors especially for less technical users (forums are filled with people who can't figure out the rules for HDMI/DP resolution combinations for their computer).
Speaking of Windows, the only real problem is that window snap doesn't allow me to set a 70/30 split vertical and horizontal instead of 50/50. Tried many different tools, but none seemed optimized for Windows 10.
I run a 43" 4K at my office, and have to conclude that I'd prefer more horizontal space (thus 2 smaller screens side-by-side, or an utlra-wide).
I contribute 2 reasons:
- The vertical space on a 43" is too much, you have to tilt your head up to see the upper region of the screen, which is not ergonomic.
- I currently run MacOS, which has horrible window management, as a result I regularly find myself piling up a whole bunch of windows in the lower center of the screen, leaving about 1/3 of the screen unused.
Situation: sitting desk, 80cm depth, sitting in the center of the screen, MacOS with stock window manager.
I'll probably hang this 43" on the wall as a dedicated grafana monitor (who doesn't love the eye candy) and place a ultrawide on my desk once I replace my aging apple laptop with something more capable of driving such display.
I also rarely use the full height from my 43" monitor. I have an 32" monitor beside from another machine, but I still use mostly more vertical space than the 32" monitor would give me.
A big plus is no scaling, so no problem with my Windows Notebook (rarely) or Linux (main machine).
I really like this video about the best way to setup two monitors - it compares price, ergonomics, productivity, aesthetics and desk space usage for all the various ways to setup two monitors
Ha, I do almost all my work on a 14' laptop. Plugging it into a spare monitor is just too much of a hassle, and I've grown used to the screen economy. The way I get around such a small screen size is to have multiple workspaces open on i3 -- one for the code editor, one for docs, one for messaging, and a bunch of other ones shelved around. Flipping between workspaces is pretty painless since it's just a keyboard shortcut but I wonder how much time I lose by getting distracted when I have too many workspaces open.
At home I've been using one 1080p 23" monitor and one 32" 4k . the 1080p is in vertical position on my left side, i keep chats there and do work and browse the web on the 4k..
At work up until 2-3 weeks ago at work I had 2 x 1080p monitors, and going from home to work felt crippling.
So i would recommend to anyone doing any type of work to get at least one 4k 30+" monitor!
Any change in the way I work is going to screw me up if it's not incrementally added. You don't just add a 2nd monitor, you significantly change your workflow. Maybe you add the 2nd monitor and don't use it at first. Then as you get work done, you drill on experiments to mine for improvements.
Some people are also more open to exploration than others. It amazes me when I show a gray beard (getting there myself actually) a new trick using keyboard shortcuts which have been shipping in that system for many years. I get that way myself at times, but I'm trying to get better at actively searching for improvements on my workflow, especially using tools which ship with the box I'm using.
If something like a 2nd monitor greatly improves your performance, then I imagine you would be able to improve just actively trying things. Otherwise it would be like adding a 2nd gearshift for a pro stock car racer. WTF am I supposed to do with that? It's going to take me a while to add it to my workflow.
They only had 3 participants. You can’t make any claims or generalizations from these results since they will likely be caused by individual differences of the participants. There may also be ordering effects.
Not to mention that we don't know if people naturally adjust to their environment over time so those "efficiency" gains disappear as users adapt to the environment (eg virtual desktops). Also no indication of operating system or task involved.
On my little experience, dual monitors is better that a single ultrawide.
I had a ultra wide on my personal computer and two 16:9 monitor on my workstation. Same OS, same desktop setup, doing the same stuff. The total area and resolution is nearly the same . I know how explain, but I feel that I have more organized the open applications using two monitors that a single ultra wide monitor.
However using the ultrawide to watch cinema movies (without black bands.. Netflix I'm watching you!) or playing games that support correctly ultra wide resolution it's a pleasure.
> Three people were selected for the study: the first person received a 24” monitor, the second participant – a 25” monitor with a 21: 9 aspect ratio, and the third participant – two 24” monitors.
The "ultrawide" monitor in this test is 1" bigger than one of the 24" monitors.
How the heck does this get counted as some kind of valid "ultrawide" comparison? Doesn't seem legit at all. :(
Lots of comments around the study...i will give my monitor thoughts as I think they're vastly different than most.
My theory is that I'd like to achieve productivity no matter where I'm at. This means I don't use more than the laptop's monitor. I've gotten really good at using workspaces to keep tasks separated and use 3 full screen "desktops" in Mac for my standard Dev flow. I never move my head to trigger a change in flow, just a quick swipe. Also every window on a desktop must be visible in some form if multiple programs are in 1 desktop.
I've never had a complaint about my performance although I don't think it would matter much if I had a different but efficient flow.
I do have some colleagues who have tried this but they don't follow rigid organization and so they can't find their windows well.
If you'd like to do away with touchpad gestures for an even faster workflow on osx, try using https://contexts.co for your switcher, and https://www.alfredapp.com for your launcher
contexts gives additional 'switching' options on different hotkeys, window searching+selection, and no mouse interaction required (but it is supported)
I have Contexts setup as follows:
cmd-tab: cycle thru all visible windows of all apps on this desktop
opt-tab: cycle thru all apps on all desktops
cmd-~: cycle thru all windows of focused app on this desktop (include hidden/minimized)
opt-~: cycle all windows of focused app on all desktops (include hidden/minimized)
cmd-space: activate Alfred
opt-space: search/activate of all running apps on all desktops
This workflow allows for complete, keyboard-driven navigation/switching, and total deprecation of the slow 10.7+ mission control gui (you can restore the older & faster exposè style window view with the app TotalSpaces)
I am going to check this out, it looks interesting. I haven't really experienced inefficiencies with the speed of mission control, but I'm open to better ways of interacting with the workspaces and applications.
> So, why do we spend money to display several things at once?
Because there's a higher cost to switching windows than just switching where you're looking.
This isn't just a developer / office worker debate, the aviation industry has done it too. Having dedicated displays is almost always better than having to cycle through windows until you find the one you want.
I guess it depends on your usage. Under my tiling setup I usually already know which "workspace" is the one I want, and how to summon it directly with a key combination. No cycling.
I find it quicker and easier to change workspace than to turn my head. For me there is one optimal display position, so I always want to be using it.
I also might have 10 workspaces, but I don't have 10 displays.
In the past I have used a three display setup where the workspace I summon gets pulled to the centre display, swapping with other workspaces, which may be displayed on the peripheral displays. However, I found that I never really liked looking at the peripheral displays while I worked, so I switched to using a single display.
I gave up on multiple monitors because I can't carry them around with me and many times I like to work away from the desk.
As a result I'd find when I'm on the laptop, my work flow would deteriorate because I'm used to multiple windows rather than the alt tab sequence.
So I made the decision to only use a 15" screen for everything, heavily depending on alt tab.
As a result I've developed a muscle memory where there is zero thought alt tabbing to any window.
This keeps my eyes in the same place - which decreases the tracking/fatigue involved and less context switch.
However, using a second monitor does increase productivity when using a monitor behind the laptop for multiple log tails - mostly because 15" is not enough to show that data.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadOnly if I will use the second one for longer than a few seconds (like reading documentation on it, or looking at a video)
If I turn my head to look at a window that I could vaguely see in the edge of my vision, there's no such disruption, at least consciously. It feels as though turning my head doesn't require any conscious attention at all, unlike the "what am I looking at? Is this what I expected? What was I thinking?" process that happens with hidden-to-visible transitions. By the time my head has turned to bring the window on the other monitor into the center of my vision, I already have the visual context, and in the meantime, I haven't lost my train of thought.
One ultra wide (I got the Dell 38") has the added benefit of making it possible to have the primary app in the center, with less important stuff occupying the far ends of the screen.
This applies to bicycles and motorcycles too.
In all seriousness the tiling window manager I use (xmonad, but any other would probably do) is more important than the number of displays I have. But it is nice to be able to use 2 vertical displays side by side to do an eyeball diff of output at times, or to keep reference material visible on the display right by the code I'm working on.
2. A 25" 21:9 ultrawide is not comparable with 2x 24" 16:10 screens. You'd need something like a 44" ultrawide to get the same screen width (omitting bezels)
[1] http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x10-vs-25-inch-21x9
Looking forward to some high dpi 38” monitors over the next few years.
The ideal position of a monitor is with the top directly in front of your eyes when your head is perfectly upright.
That said you obviously don't have to turn your head as much, which might make up for that.
Back to 2-28s now. Debating on getting 1 49" but I'm worried I'll miss having two completely separated monitors.
This is all also really dependent on the applications you run. I'm personally stuck running a CRM and remote control programs that open new windows for everything. 1 large high-resolution display + heavy use of macOS workspace seems like the best way to deal with it, though my colleagues all prefer 2 displays. Anecdotal observation indicates that none of us can easily find the window we were just looking at once we move away from it, so I think the window manager needs work too.
The 27/30" inch monitors that are only 1080 make no sense to me. Maybe if you have really bad vision. I love my LG 4K and would like a 27" 5K but they're expensive. The text is so sharp on those things.
But, for a 21" monitor that is only 1080, if you're using multiple ones, you can sit back far enough away to be able to see 4 of them and not have the text unreadably small.
The younger guys at work like 25" 2560x1440 monitors and just run 8 point fonts, my vision was never very good so I could never use that for more than a few minutes. I'm using a pair of 27" monitors but I do end up turning my head a lot. I'd like to try a 3840x1440 screen.
We have a couple Steelcase 'collaboration tables', some with 1 40-something inch TV and some with 2 slightly smaller ones. They basically look like this:
https://images.steelcase.com/image/upload/v1415376898/www.st...
They are very nice to use for a few hours. My theory is that with the screen being 3-4 feet away from your eyes, your eyes are very relaxed. Watching TV vs reading a book.
This is despite the fact that they are only 1080 resolution. I'm sure we could stick 4K screens in there but I'm not sure how much more useful the resolution would be at 40".
My personal experience is the opposite. With just one screen I tend to sit still in one position for long periods at a time and feel really uncomfortable after a couple hours. With my current 3 monitor setup I not only turn my head frequently but even sit differently depending on which screen currently has main focus and which one is e.g. just showing debug info or logs.
It's been obvious since the CRT days that the biggest possible monitor was best. Anything smaller was like trying to navigate through a porthole instead of the broad seascape visible from the bridge.
The ultimate in some SciFi scenes, a large curved desk-monitor surround, though past the point of diminishing returns for most tasks, still seems cool for very complex tasks, or large CAD work...
I use a combination of head movement and rotating the chair depending on task.
The outstanding benefit is to have multiple applications and documents open and readable simultaneously, just as I would with multiple physical reference books.
An added benefit is having the same 'book' (document) open at different 'pages' on different monitors - and not need to flick back and forward between 'pages' or tabs.
This is using GNU/Linux Xorg server with 4 X sessions.
[1] Dell XPS with ExpressCard -> PCIe ViDock extender containing an Nvidia NVS420 driving 4 monitors, the laptop panel, and an HDMI connection, all 1920x1200.
However, it does make remote sys-admin safer too in that I can assign remote hosts to specific monitors - avoids the risk of accidentally issuing commands to the wrong target!
I don't understand this - you think rotating moving your chair is less effort than clicking alt/command + tab. And you struggle terribly - wtf are you talking about. Struggle to do what exactly, press alt tab ?
Yes, I'm a developer I have n putty sessions etc, etc.
[1] http://iam.tj/projects/misc/workstation-6-monitor.jpg [2] http://iam.tj/projects/misc/xorg.XPS-NVS420-6monitor.conf
It isn't really "simultaneously, though, right? Unless each eyes can somehow look at different screens and a brain that can handle processing that. There's a good argument for peripheral awareness helping, though.
So the real question is: is it quicker to turn your head (with multiple monitors), or not turn your head and use a key bind to switch between screens (on the same monitor)?
Furthermore, if someone determines that multiple monitors is best, then one cannot discount the fact that a single larger monitor with a cleverly setup windows manager could not out compete it... At least based on the lack of physical space separating the monitors.
I would also like to try a curved monitor, but I doubt it will be as good for text-based applications.
So I've had both large single and 3-monitor systems for many years. I still cannot tell which is better.
A few others in the company use one or more vertical screens too. Those of us who do, certainly like the increased vertical space.
Quality of window management is also going to be an important factor: of the two main OSes: Windows is good at simple window-per-screen and two-tiled-windows-per-screen arrangements; macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it. (I’m on Windows for now, but I’m planning on trying Arch Linux, which I previously used, on my Surface Book, as it’s now probably good enough to work with. With Sway (i3 clone for Wayland), its handling of such a screen arrangement will be superb.)
It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.
The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.
That’s because it is bunk. Low back pain researchers found ages ago that the most ergonomic setup for alleviating back pain was the one that let you shift positions every 15 minutes or so. There is no position so ergonomic that the body can tolerate holding it for extended periods of time.
I have fairly aggressive progressive trifocals, and don't have problems with my 27" portrait monitors. I just angle them so the top tilts toward me.
I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.
I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.
Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)
The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.
But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)
For eye health, have the monitors backing a window (or 20+ feet of empty space), so that you can periodically (at least every 20 minutes) look past the monitors at an "infinite" plane.
Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.
* Center - main focus of work (normally an IDE) * Left - Documentation * Right - Browser/Simulator * Mac - Slack/Chat/Email/Calender
All through USBC daisy chaining? I have three display ports on a 1080TI, but it's fascinating to see how much flexibility Type C allows.
It’s last update is a bit buggy, but it’s great
It really only makes sense on large screens though. If you spend a lot of time on the laptop screen overlapping windows + spectacle is better.
It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.
To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.
But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.
Maybe i should try this:
Use the left for docs/spreadsheets/plots, middle for the IDE, top right for monitoring/CI/market data, bottom right for terminals.I may have docs or a search window on one monitor and the IDE in another but I'll completely log out of anything social (including email).
I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.
Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.
I like to sum up this debate like this:
With multiple monitors, you're confined into smaller, "hard-coded" boxes that can't be changed. With a single large screen you have much more flexibility.
I've also found that such extra complexity impacts productivity negatively. It's an unnecessary distraction trying to communicate such complicated layouts.
I think for programming the 2560/1600 = 1920/1200 = 1.6 or the 3000/2000 = 1.5 ratio is a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately it's not a common ratio among big but cheap monitors...
The extra head movement required to look into the corners of a 27" or even a 25" vertical monitor definitely puts a little strain on my neck compared to a 25" horizontal one, but with frequent posture changes and breaks, while a bit tiring, I don't feel it caused any permanent damage.
At least I hope it's not the reason why the middle of my upper back feels like falling apart any minute... Maybe that thai massage, when a lady was walking on my back for half an hour was a bit too much? :D
Also, where do you get 39" 4K for $300!?
TVs have moved on a lot in the past 3-4 years. The most difficult part about 39" TVs is finding something that small.
I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.
But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.
it's only about 2' of vertical space, but 8' of horizontal, so I have them laid out in a semi-circle.
I have 39" seiki TV's, all about 4 years old now. As one of the other posters mentioned, it actually seems rare to find any 4K TV that small any more. But a brief search on amazon shows you can still get stuff in that price range, but Seiki seems to be gone :(
At three foot, you have a circumference of 18foot. The idea of almost 180° of monitors still unsettles me. That's beyond neck work, that's practically into separate workspaces. If you're looking at the left side of Monitor 1, Monitor 3 is physically out of —even peripheral— eyeline.
I don't know why I'm flapping on about it. If it works for you, that's great.
Using the 3rd requires me to twist my upper body a bit uncomfortably. as a result I find that I tend to keep it dedicated to little used apps, like email and sourcetree (a git gui)
1) Input lag. A mouse 200+ms behind is frustrating to work with.
2) Color space. I forget the terms off hand, but basically if the panel has poor colour space / bit depth / whatever, fonts start looking really bad.
Maybe you lucked out or just don't notice/care about these, but that's one of the core reasons people don't use TVs.
I'm quite tempted to get a large good one though.
For coding purposes I don't think color accuracy matters much, but I see why latency might annoy some people, though it doesn't bother me.
probably could do that on the samsungs too, burried in the menus somewhere.
You're referring to chroma subsampling. Rtings does a review of 4k TVs that support 4:4:4 chroma.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/by-usage/pc-monitor
This page also has a link to their subsampling article.
Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB). Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.
In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.
I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.
To be fair IntelliJ didn't work with xmonad out of the box either. I had to set some strange `startupHook = setWMName "LG3D"` Source: https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#P...
One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.
That sounds weird, so let me explain:
LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).
Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.
But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.
It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.
It's helps with coding, too, but scrolling is still usually necessary there.
macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.
MacOS is good for doing it horizontally, but you're right — there should be a mechanism for vertical tiling on portrait displays in macOS.
I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.
1. https://www.madrau.com/ 2. https://www.spectacleapp.com/
One display is also no muss, no fuss. The time wasted on fiddling with displays, layouts and dealing with OS (oh Windows..) issues can negate the benefits of multiple monitors especially for less technical users (forums are filled with people who can't figure out the rules for HDMI/DP resolution combinations for their computer).
Speaking of Windows, the only real problem is that window snap doesn't allow me to set a 70/30 split vertical and horizontal instead of 50/50. Tried many different tools, but none seemed optimized for Windows 10.
Just recently I've bought a silly Razer Tartarus V2 keyboard just to bind window positions on GridMove to specific keys. Jury's still out.
I contribute 2 reasons:
- The vertical space on a 43" is too much, you have to tilt your head up to see the upper region of the screen, which is not ergonomic.
- I currently run MacOS, which has horrible window management, as a result I regularly find myself piling up a whole bunch of windows in the lower center of the screen, leaving about 1/3 of the screen unused.
Situation: sitting desk, 80cm depth, sitting in the center of the screen, MacOS with stock window manager.
I'll probably hang this 43" on the wall as a dedicated grafana monitor (who doesn't love the eye candy) and place a ultrawide on my desk once I replace my aging apple laptop with something more capable of driving such display.
A big plus is no scaling, so no problem with my Windows Notebook (rarely) or Linux (main machine).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1N3jlgqcQ4
I don't have fancy monitor arms though, so for now my two monitors are just placed right beside each other on my desk.
At work up until 2-3 weeks ago at work I had 2 x 1080p monitors, and going from home to work felt crippling.
So i would recommend to anyone doing any type of work to get at least one 4k 30+" monitor!
Some people are also more open to exploration than others. It amazes me when I show a gray beard (getting there myself actually) a new trick using keyboard shortcuts which have been shipping in that system for many years. I get that way myself at times, but I'm trying to get better at actively searching for improvements on my workflow, especially using tools which ship with the box I'm using.
If something like a 2nd monitor greatly improves your performance, then I imagine you would be able to improve just actively trying things. Otherwise it would be like adding a 2nd gearshift for a pro stock car racer. WTF am I supposed to do with that? It's going to take me a while to add it to my workflow.
Studies in general assume a certain level of scientific rigour, reproducibility and verifiability.
To further your point, the discussion here is as valuable as the original article: people sharing their individual anecdotal experiences.
The "ultrawide" monitor in this test is 1" bigger than one of the 24" monitors.
How the heck does this get counted as some kind of valid "ultrawide" comparison? Doesn't seem legit at all. :(
Not area-wise. It's going to be shorter as well, which would make it worse for programming related tasks :|
http://www.displaywars.com/24-inch-16x9-vs-25-inch-21x9
My theory is that I'd like to achieve productivity no matter where I'm at. This means I don't use more than the laptop's monitor. I've gotten really good at using workspaces to keep tasks separated and use 3 full screen "desktops" in Mac for my standard Dev flow. I never move my head to trigger a change in flow, just a quick swipe. Also every window on a desktop must be visible in some form if multiple programs are in 1 desktop.
I've never had a complaint about my performance although I don't think it would matter much if I had a different but efficient flow.
I do have some colleagues who have tried this but they don't follow rigid organization and so they can't find their windows well.
contexts gives additional 'switching' options on different hotkeys, window searching+selection, and no mouse interaction required (but it is supported)
I have Contexts setup as follows:
This workflow allows for complete, keyboard-driven navigation/switching, and total deprecation of the slow 10.7+ mission control gui (you can restore the older & faster exposè style window view with the app TotalSpaces)Because there's a higher cost to switching windows than just switching where you're looking.
This isn't just a developer / office worker debate, the aviation industry has done it too. Having dedicated displays is almost always better than having to cycle through windows until you find the one you want.
I find it quicker and easier to change workspace than to turn my head. For me there is one optimal display position, so I always want to be using it.
I also might have 10 workspaces, but I don't have 10 displays.
In the past I have used a three display setup where the workspace I summon gets pulled to the centre display, swapping with other workspaces, which may be displayed on the peripheral displays. However, I found that I never really liked looking at the peripheral displays while I worked, so I switched to using a single display.
I gave up on multiple monitors because I can't carry them around with me and many times I like to work away from the desk.
As a result I'd find when I'm on the laptop, my work flow would deteriorate because I'm used to multiple windows rather than the alt tab sequence.
So I made the decision to only use a 15" screen for everything, heavily depending on alt tab.
As a result I've developed a muscle memory where there is zero thought alt tabbing to any window.
This keeps my eyes in the same place - which decreases the tracking/fatigue involved and less context switch.
However, using a second monitor does increase productivity when using a monitor behind the laptop for multiple log tails - mostly because 15" is not enough to show that data.