
A fun question - Which one are you?
I always use two monitors at the office and one at home (including Mac) =) No reason to use more.
Using an ultrawide at work + laptop screen beside it, and it works great with tiling WM like chunkwm (or i3wm). At home i have 2 old 1080 screens that desperately needs an upgrade! I was considering going ultrawide at home as well, but many games arent too good with wider aspect ratios so might just go with 2 of 4k monitors or something.
Unless they're identical screens, multiple screens are a distraction to me. I'm a pixel-perfect sort of person, so they gotta line up if I'm going to use them. I could have multiple, one on my laptop, one on my main screen, but they don't line up, and the head-turning is a pain after awhile anyway.
I used to be a 2 or 3-screen setup, I even used QuickSynergy so I could use 1 keyboard and mouse seamlessly across Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop so I was using 3 screens with three different operating systems at once. At that time I couldn't imagine how laptop users ever survived.
But then I got deeper into using keyboard shortcuts, and can summon any application I want in a split second. I no longer worry too much about being able to see it 'all at once' when I know I can see it as fast as I need to. Naturally, I just stopped using my external displays - now they sit here all day off, not even plugged in, and I'm using my laptop.
But I feel like there's a third option, option C. I still find myself surrounded by screens, but they're phone screens and tablets in addition to my computer, rather than screens being driven by the computer alone. I'd say right now I'm a laptop + tablet user :D
Currently using two (one 27" 2560x1440 as main and the old one - 20" 1680x1050 as secondary) which makes me closer to the left one than to the right. I don't see myself using more than two, although if I had the space for a third one, it would probably just sit with the desktop visible and a Rainmeter clock on it. I think about moving to a 34" 3440x1440 and relegating the 27" as a secondary. Once you get used to that amount of pixels, 1080p starts to look small; on the other hand, I do occasionally game, so 4K would be a bit of an overkill even for the GTX 1080.
I thought about getting 3 screens, but went for 2 big ones (2560 x 1440) instead. Not great quality ones since I mostly view text, not games or movies.
I think at this point it's easier to press a hotkey to show another workspace on the screen, than it is to turn my head. But who knows, maybe one day.
My non-programmer friend has two screens, but keeps turning one off to watch videos or to not lose the mouse. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone would do that... If my crappy GPU supported it, I'd steal one screen.
I really dislike working on laptops, but that's as much about the screen as the keyboard and mouse.
Haha, definitely right! I love screens! The more, the better. I need a screen for my IDE, one for the browser, one for the dev tools, one for email and one for other stuff .... AT LEAST.
Unfortunately, I only get 2-3 screens at the office (depending on where I sit) and at home, one of my monitors is broken, so I am down to two ๐
Since I like to game, I want to get a HDR, UHD, curved one with 27"+, 144Hz optional. Them beasts are too expensive, though.
Gijo Varghese
A WordPress speed enthusiast
My current setup is a dual screen. However, I would like to try an Ultra-wide monitor instead of multiple screens