IMO, you must have two or more monitors for almost anything that you want to do in a more productive way. Even if you are a writer and use MS Word as main tool, you still probably navigate the web for inspiration or etc. and in that case a second monitor will make you more productive. For programming is a definitive must-have!

As a Front-End developer and using livereloading whenever I do changes to html, css or js it is actually a time saver to have two monitors, one with the IDE on full screen and the other with the browser. This saves me a lot of time, I had a teacher that taught us about 3d stuff he said that maya had a tool that with one keystroke you could repeat the action of the last tool you used... he said that it saved you around 2 - 5 seconds from doing or selecting again the tool and recreating the action and when it was a very small project it did not matter at all.... but when you were on a very long and heavy project seconds would turn to minutes, minutes to hours and hours to days... so yes having two monitors is actually a time saver but when using an iMac is kind of difficult to plug in or using two, so at work I'm stuck with one :(

Not at all, for me, I only have a laptop and that monitor that sits on it.I tried 2 and 3 monitors and it made me more confused than productive, but I guess I'm used to tab around. Chat And email I get notifications about, so no need for a monitor and my focus is only one point at a time anyway.

Now I've a 15 inch laptop with 4k, that's nice, but before I had 13 inch with less than full HD, that's a bit too tiny.

Sure it is.

Left: server monitoring tools; office chat

Right: whatever I'm working on / reading now

Top: Google Analytics real time

I had a 4th to the right where the plant is but was getting sick of not having any physical desk space.

All of the monitors show or do something critical to my job - could I get away with 1? Sure. But with monitors being so cheap; why not?

At work, I unfortunately only have a laptop and one monitor, so I usually keep my Outlook on the laptop and code on the external screen.

At home, however, I use two monitors (the third one is non-functional at the moment :( ).

For Web Development I use one monitor for writing code and the other one for viewing the result (+debugging) and doing google searches.

For Game Programming I usually fill up all screens with source code, since I manage my code in many files and several projects. When hitting the debug button, I usually run the program on one screen and debug on another.

So, yeah, I think it boosts productivity as you can view several things next to each other (easier for comparisons etc.) and you don't have to tab through a lot of windows (for me, at least, it's quite a lot of windows all the time)

Hi @harryjet ! I think it's very usefull for a web developper. In fact, I often have my IDE on one screen and the rendering on the other. It prevents me alt-tabbing every time and allows me to focus in general.

Now to truly answer your question, no it is not "truly" usefull. I saw many developpers work quick and fine on one monitor. I'll say it's more a matter of comfort over productivity.

Hope it helped :).

I actually work with a monitor and the screen of the laptop and I think it's useful, for example to have in one page the application and in the other the debugger/web development console or can combine two views, or incognito mode in one and normal mode in other.