Is using a widescreen monitor in portrait orientation more effective for coding? [closed]

Question

In the very near future my development setup will be upgraded and part of the deal will be dual monitors (yay!)

At least one of the monitors, possibly both, will be widescreen.

I've heard of developers using a second monitor, especially a widescreen monitor, in portrait mode. It allows for many more lines on the screen (albeit narrower) and runs a bit like having a long page of code.

Does anyone out there use this and think it's more effective?

Answer 1

I actually have 3 widescreen monitors in portrait mode and yes, it's a fantastic way to work. There's so much less scrolling around and you can fit all your debug / output / reference windows on screen at once.

The problem with using two monitors is that you'll generally be working on one main one and have output (or whatever on another). If you do have two, set it up so that your primary monitor is directly in front of you and the other (less frequently used) one is off to one side. I find that to be the best way to use a dual-monitor set up as it reduces RSI from being permanently twisted to look at a particular screen.

Additionally, there are some programs available to provide virtual screen splits which I've fund very useful for large/widescreen monitor setups.

[edit] ..and yes, you should write functions short enough to fit on a single page, but being able to see more functions at any one time can often make development easier in my experience :-)

[edit2] Running Visual-Studio-esque IDEs in portrait on a widescreen monitor is fantastic when it comes to debugging compile errors as you have more useable space to see code and errors at the same time. I suppose you could argue that if you compile regularly enough though, you shouldn't see that many errors at one time? ...but who codes like that? ;-)

Answer 2

Since you shouldn't write functions that are longer than a screen, making the screen much longer is a little bit of cheating, isn't it? ;)

Anyway, I found portrait mode not really better when coding, and only with my old 17" widescreen in portrait mode was viewing / editing documents better. With two large screens in landscape mode, You can put two pages on a screen when viewing documents, and have many tool windows open at both sides of the IDE's text editor. So no, portrait mode is not better, unless you have four of them to make up a really large screen (there was a photo of such a setup on a Microsoft blog, but I don't remember where).

There are some applications where portrait is still better, though, e.g. if you have to show a document in large resolution, or if you have some monitor (as in network monitor) running and want to see more lines at once.

Answer 3

I can't imagine how that would speed up productivity. In my opinion, it is always easier to scroll up/down than left/right.