ThoughtShapes - Personalized Monitor Position - Comments

Hah. Sorry, Abby...we seem

Steve Seymour — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:44:00 -0400

Hah. Sorry, Abby...we seem to be so busy these days that for the 1000 posts we'd like to put up here, we never find the time to actually do the writing. Kind of bothers me a bit, but--oh well.

You should see my setup: I have two 24" on top, and one 24" on the bottom (in the middle of the two on top). In the next couple of days I'm going to hook in another 24" on the bottom which I'll keep off to the side a bit (otherwise it would get in the way of my windows, and I'm talking the holes in the side of a house variety here :) ).

Top left monitor: email and IM windows

Top right monitor: Windows explorer and development environment "extra" windows (such as Resharper windows, of course). I also have a browser open up on this monitor.

Bottom monitor: Development environment

Why? It helps me move as fast as possible and allows me to remove annoyances that would clutter up my mind just enough to lose focus on the itty-bitty details that we deal with everyday. Instead, I get to focus on what I need to focus on and not get distracted by things such as IM windows popping up, etc.

I just came back to see if

abby, the hacker chick blog — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:10:48 -0500

I just came back to see if you had any new posts up - are you trying to compete with me for longest delay between blogs? :-)

I still want to hear from you on your send all nulls to /dev/null solution - were you able to implement that?

Re: the geek toys. I unfortunately have sloped ceilings in my office, so I don't think I could actually accommodate the space :( but I DID just get a snazzy new tablet - the Thinkpad X200 Tablet : http://gizmodo.com/5051875/lenovo-thinkpad-x200-tablet-12-inches-of-touc...

All you dev heads out there

Rjae Easton — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:12:00 -0500

All you dev heads out there should go read Abby's blog. She gets it.

Yeah, Abby, I guess I prefer the vertical stack - and I've tested that preference for two months now by using side-by-side arrangement. (I was forced into this after a move to a temporary house where I don't want to drill mounting hardware into the wall.)

I highly recommend 27" over 24" to anyone making a new purchase. Text is considerably larger and thus much less work on the eyes. When I work from Steve's house (24" monitors) I feel the difference.

What does one do with so much real estate? Well my typical setup is the following:

Bottom monitor is always dedicated to whatever editor I am using. For the most part that is Visual Studio.
Top monitor has: browser, several IM chats, email, and my favorite Windows console. It also has my unit test runner and tail sessions.

Now what I really want is one of those spiffy tablets like you have. Steve and I are currently in the research phase for a new product, code named "The Kitchen", that is geared towards touchscreens. :^)

Wow, is that two 27"

abby, the hacker chick blog — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:41:20 -0500

Wow, is that two 27" widescreen displays stacked on top of one another? What do you DO on that thing?

I've got 2 monitors - but they're side by side, so the config settings stay put. A 24" widescreen and then, to it's right, a 20" widescreen flipped on it's side in a portrait configuration. Which, I thought was a pretty spiffy config, but now... two 27" stacked on top of one another.

I'm going to have to rethink this.

Personalized Monitor Position

Rjae Easton — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:05:29 -0400

Are you running Vista? Do you have dual monitors? Last question: do you have them stacked vertically?