I’m mainly curious about software developers here, or anyone else whose computer is somewhat central to their life, be it professional or hobbyist.
I only have two monitors—one directly in front of me, and another to the right of it, angled toward me. For web development, I keep my editor on the main screen, and anything auxiliary (be that a dev build, a video, StackOverflow, etc.) on the side screen.
I wouldn’t mind a third monitor, and if I had one, I’d definitely use it for log/output, since currently it’s a floating window that I shuffle around however necessary. It could be smaller than the other two, and I might even turn it vertical so I could split the screen between output and a terminal, configuring a AutoHotKey script to focus the terminal.
What about y’all?
[ cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13864053 ]
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Three monitors here. Primary and secondary pretty much exactly like you. Tertiary is a cheap portable one, 15", 1080p, that I’ve mounted above the secondary slightly angled downward and on which I have my communication apps pinned, as well as a full screen
btop.Oh, neat! Yeah, I think I’ve seriously talked myself into getting a small third monitor. Using it for communication apps is a good idea, and I can definitely see having that when I’m just relaxing, or if I’m collaborating. Thanks for your response!
I’ve wanted the overhead comms display off and on for a while now. Two screens for input/output work, then the overhead screen for discord/hangouts/teams/email status. I don’t need the overhead one all the time, but some days it would be insanely useful when things are buzzing in the group.
Haha, ditto. I’ve got the 34inch 4:3 for tasks like cad and image stuff, then next to it the 34inch ultramodern which I use for spreadsheets or multi-pane stuff, then my extra monitor up that lives up at a weird angle is my at-a-glance home for slack, btop, nvtop and any running scripts I want to keep an eye on.
I have been using 2-3 monitors for more than 20 years now it’s the best.
I use 3 monitors at work, the left one is for outlook and teams, the middle one is the main development monitor, the right one is for browsers chrome/edge for work related sites, FF for surfing.
Pretty much exactly the same for my work setup except flip left and right .
I can’t effectively use 3 for personal stuff, one monitor at work pretty much exclusively is for teams and outlook
Word yo
Three monitors at work, one at home… my work ones are 1080p, my home monitor is 1440/165
…I prefer my home monitor for working, even beyond the WFH perks. I have no idea why. I wish my company would gimme a high rez+refresh screen.
Three screens billed as “business expense” actually used as a sim racing rig.
But you will end up filling any screen space you have. When coding I very quickly fill out the space, to see files and folders I am intereacting with, communication apps, websites, IDE, ticket screen. Some days I wish I had 4.
I work in IT. I have three, 2 standard orientation and a third vertical.
I use one for email and tickets, one for general browsing and remote administration, and the vertical one split horizontally with Teams on top and my terminal client/file browser on the bottom.
One monitor for ide. One monitor for docs.
Third screen, laptop, for slack/zoom
I have 5 if you count the one on my server.
One 1440p, 3 1080s- one in a vertical orientation for reading through lengthy config files. An additional 1080p that is used for specific servers, so I’m not sure if that counts since it’s technically a different machine ?
Use case varies drastically but, left to right:
Monitor 1 on the left is typically used for for videos throughout my work day, usually some Indian guy explaining a very technical concept in fractured English in a notepad document- that’s how you know you’re in deeeeep
Monitor 2 is the 1440 and it’s the main event so to speak. Whatever I’m working on the most at that moment goes onto that monitor.
Monitor 3 is the vertical monitor and used mostly for comms separated into 2-3 sections. Video calls on top, work chat underneath that. Config files opened in notepad++ when not actively using the comms.
Monitor 4 is technically on a different machine as well but it stays on my desk and looks like a normal part of the setup. I use mouse without borders to use my keyboard across both systems.
Monitor 5 is attached to an Dell Poweredge that I use as a proxmox host, which itself is used to host a pi-hole, home assistant, graylog, an truenas instance running plex. The truenas thing will probably go away and I’ll run the plex server directly on a machine with more graphical capability. On its other input is an old datto that doesn’t really do much yet.
Note: not a software dev, but a network engineer
Interesting. I mean, if it’s practical for the usage of your computer, then I would say it counts. What kind of information do you have displayed for your server? Just metadata, or logs?
Edit: posted before I could see your edit. But yeah, definitely checks out. I think I would get so distracted by that, but at most I really only need to be paying close attention to changes in three places at a time, at which point I’ve got to do some window-focus-fu with PowerToys. Cool answer!
Kinda varies. That particular monitor is pretty multi purpose, it has a server on the hdmi, a server on the vga, and a little dell tower that gets used as a demo machine/sacrificial lamb depending on the experiment. Day to day I’d say that’s the default.
For the servers it’s just console access for convenience. They mostly run headless.
Power toys is the BEST (if you just have to use windows anyway)
Software engineer. I have a laptop to which I attach a curved widescreen monitor and a split mechanical keyboard with rainbow LEDs. The keyboard travels with me, and I have similar monitors at home and at work
For work, I have 2 monitors, and my docked laptop. The main two monitors are hugely beneficial for software development, as I can reference design docs or requirements while writing code, or I can have the debugger running on one screen, while the app runs on the other.
The laptop screen is where Teams and Outlook sit, so I can glance over at messages from the team, and maybe respond, without having to swap around any of my workspace.
Yeah this is me. I love this set up.
I dabble in development but not all day. I’m an accountant. My laptop monitor is usually music, chats, video calls. The other two are just whatever I’m working on emails, spreadsheets, browser based applications. I would absolutely miss having the third monitor.
Presently my daily driver is a Lenovo t490s. The laptop monitor is HD but I don’t think it can support more than 1920 on the monitors on the dock. I’d love to move up to all HD one day. That would be amazing. I’m near sighted so smaller-than-usual text is quite comfortable. having HD would give me so much more usable space within my field of view.
I have three, but while I felt the move from 1 to 2 all those years ago was an insanely huge boost at work, I find 3 to be a nice to have, but I don’t miss it if I only have 2.
Others may have a workflow that heavily relies on three, but I don’t get pissed off until circumstances whittle me down to only one.
I used to swear by two monitors, but switched to a single ultrawide and it’s so much nicer. No bevels in the middle and therefore freedom to set up windows in whatever configuration you like. Good tiling window manager is a must though.
Two screens. One is dedicated to the IDE, the other is everything else: browser, mail and chat clients, docs, maybe another IDE with a REPL to play with stuff.
I find I need a large code window. I know devs that use a 4K monitor the same way, but I don’t have one.I’m a software engineer. I have an ultrawide for my personal stuff (a odyssey g9) , for productivity it functions as 2 27in displays side by side, usually youtube/twitch and whatever task I should be doing. When I game the wide aspect ratio is nice. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it is nice.
Above the ultrawide I have 2 27in for work. kinda hard to say what they usually have open but heres a handful of scenarios:
- meeting notes / meting presentation
- Jira Ticket / remote to the test system
- monitoring my code compiling / team chat
- IDE / Documents or chat
- debugger / notes
but really any combination of 2 tasks (usually one being monitored or referenced and one being worked on). I have been thinking about getting another vertical monitor exclusively for chat. Having chat already open and responding breaks my concentration a lot less than having to pull up the chat over top of whatever I was doing. It’s definitely diminishing returns
Some other display topologies I see used:
- one coworker uses a large TV (I think 60in) and then partitions the display into various virtual multi-monitor setups depending on his needs.
- My wife (a dev ops engineer) has a 30in in the middle and 2 verticals at the side
I’m a dev manager… I have 3x4k monitors. I watch server loads, I watch the build pipeline and watch the commit logs etc.
Overkill these days, but I’m also a gamer sooooo…
So besides looking at the blinkenlights, you let your team to all of the work, right?
100% My job is to stop the team from feeling all the corporate BS as much as possible. I’m an ex-dev myself so my job is to make sure they’re OK and that thy’re not getting pressure from stakeholders/PMs/POs etc.
A massive amount of tech managers have zero empathy sadly. But I’m the complete opposite. If anyone in my team isn’t doing OK they just need to tell me, whether it’s financial, personal, work-related etc.
3 screens are ideal for me:
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Primary
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Secondary screen to be able to look at 2 windows (that are maximized) side by side with the primary screen
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3rd screen for static apps that are always open like email, slack, music, etc.
Having said that, getting a widescreen monitor has helped reduce my desk space requirements a lot. So now I only have 1 widescreen, and my laptop acting as the 3rd screen.
How big of an ultrawide do you have? I’ve currently got two 27” monitors but I’d like to get one ultrawide to replace these two and then get (in the future) another to go above the ultrawide.
I “only” have a 34", but it’s enough to fit 2 windows side by side without sacrificing their layouts. It also has thunderbolt so it acts as a dock as well and I no longer need to use my thunderbolt dock. I only have one thunderbolt cable that runs between my laptop and the monitor, and it supplies power, usb connectivity (for my webcam), and even audio connectivity (headphone port).
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I have 2x27" screens. 1 is 1080 the other 1440.
For work, I would say it’s invaluable (software developer) to have say VSCode/VS running on local machine and say an RDP session open. Or to have open Jira issues on one screen or basically the actual program code and another screen with information/testing environments. It’s far better than finding the window you need all the time with alt-tab/the task bar.
Outside work, I generally have youtube on the 1080 screen while doing other things (games/personal development etc) on the 1440 screen.
As for a third monitor. I think there’s definitely valid use cases. But, I have a big desk but another 27" screen would just take up too much space. I am tempted in the future to replace the 1080 with something higher resolution though.