It’s phenomenal for reading threads and large pages but I’m not sure it’s good for you.

I have fairly aggressive progressive trifocals, and don't have problems with my 27" portrait monitors. I just angle them so the top tilts toward me.

I much preferred my portrait 4:3 1600x1200 (as 3:4) monitor a decade ago. Was close to perfect since there was room for two long windows side by side.

I've wondered if 16:10 might be good also. But as mentioned, those choices were eliminated in the "great widescreening" of the 2010s.

The whole presumption that you want to spend 8 hours in an ergonomically ideal position without motion seems like bunk. Indeed, I find changing positions to be much more ergonomically valuable than having an ideal position. If I spend 30 minutes each across 16 awkward positions, I do just fine. An ergonomic chair, mechanical keyboard, perfect-height monitor, etc. for an 8 hour stretch each day hits me much harder.

That’s because it is bunk. Low back pain researchers found ages ago that the most ergonomic setup for alleviating back pain was the one that let you shift positions every 15 minutes or so. There is no position so ergonomic that the body can tolerate holding it for extended periods of time.

Each year my company's HR department brings in ergonomics experts who watch each employee work, and they make suggestions (This employee needs a new chair... this employee's keyboard is at the wrong angle... this employee sits too low and his feet aren't on the floor right... etc...)

The last time they came through, they voiced no objections to my portrait monitors.

  ┌────┐       ┌────┐
  │    ├───────┤    │
  │····│       │····│
  │    │       │    │
  └────┴───────┴────┘

It's usually the IDE or a spreadsheet in the middle, email or Slack bottom left, market data top left, monitoring/CI top right, and terminals bottom right. Quite often i split the middle landscape monitor too, with an editor in the left half and docs in the right half, or editor left and gnuplot right.

To be honest, the density value is low; this is definitely a case of screen sprawl. Having my email always up does not help productivity, having Slack always up is even worse, i rarely look at the market data (at the moment), and CI and monitoring could be a panel icon and some notifications rather than half a screen.

But then, i find looking at the upper half of the portrait screens a bit uncomfortable, so it makes some sense to use them for information that i don't look at all the time, but is really handy to have occasional fast access to.

Maybe i should try this:

                  ┌────┐
  ┌───────┬───────┤    │
  │   ·   │       │····│
  │   ·   │       │    │
  └───────┴───────┴────┘

I may have docs or a search window on one monitor and the IDE in another but I'll completely log out of anything social (including email).

  ┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐┌────┬────┐
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  │    │    ││    │    ││    │    │
  └────┴────┘└────┴────┘└────┴────┘

I use windows. If you do, you can choose this layout quickly: hit Win+<Arrow Key> to adjust the layout of your current window and/or move them from screen to screen.

Honestly I'm a bit surprised people don't do this more. (I do coding all day long) You can get the TV's for about USD$300 each. 3x is a bit overboard I admit, but 2x is really, really awesome and it's distressing trying to code on my laptop anymore.

1) Input lag. A mouse 200+ms behind is frustrating to work with.

2) Color space. I forget the terms off hand, but basically if the panel has poor colour space / bit depth / whatever, fonts start looking really bad.

Maybe you lucked out or just don't notice/care about these, but that's one of the core reasons people don't use TVs.

I'm quite tempted to get a large good one though.

For coding purposes I don't think color accuracy matters much, but I see why latency might annoy some people, though it doesn't bother me.

probably could do that on the samsungs too, burried in the menus somewhere.

You're referring to chroma subsampling. Rtings does a review of 4k TVs that support 4:4:4 chroma.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/best/by-usage/pc-monitor

This page also has a link to their subsampling article.

Also, where do you get 39" 4K for $300!?

TVs have moved on a lot in the past 3-4 years. The most difficult part about 39" TVs is finding something that small.

I like to sum up this debate like this:

With multiple monitors, you're confined into smaller, "hard-coded" boxes that can't be changed. With a single large screen you have much more flexibility.

I've also found that such extra complexity impacts productivity negatively. It's an unnecessary distraction trying to communicate such complicated layouts.

I think for programming the 2560/1600 = 1920/1200 = 1.6 or the 3000/2000 = 1.5 ratio is a reasonable middle ground. Unfortunately it's not a common ratio among big but cheap monitors...

The extra head movement required to look into the corners of a 27" or even a 25" vertical monitor definitely puts a little strain on my neck compared to a 25" horizontal one, but with frequent posture changes and breaks, while a bit tiring, I don't feel it caused any permanent damage.

At least I hope it's not the reason why the middle of my upper back feels like falling apart any minute... Maybe that thai massage, when a lady was walking on my back for half an hour was a bit too much? :D

I use a single 40" 4K monitor (not a TV but only by lack of a tuner) and that's about 30" from my face most of the time. That's too big. I often neglect vertical space because it involves moving my neck.

But three of these things is over 8 foot of vertical space. That's ridiculous.

it's only about 2' of vertical space, but 8' of horizontal, so I have them laid out in a semi-circle.

I have 39" seiki TV's, all about 4 years old now. As one of the other posters mentioned, it actually seems rare to find any 4K TV that small any more. But a brief search on amazon shows you can still get stuff in that price range, but Seiki seems to be gone :(

At three foot, you have a circumference of 18foot. The idea of almost 180° of monitors still unsettles me. That's beyond neck work, that's practically into separate workspaces. If you're looking at the left side of Monitor 1, Monitor 3 is physically out of —even peripheral— eyeline.

I don't know why I'm flapping on about it. If it works for you, that's great.

Using the 3rd requires me to twist my upper body a bit uncomfortably. as a result I find that I tend to keep it dedicated to little used apps, like email and sourcetree (a git gui)

Magnet (http://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) costs 1 USD, but it provides mouse control via snapping at the display edges and it's also tiny (6MB). Its default keybindings does NOT clash with most apps. They are logical, hence memorable. They are easy to press too.

In fact I invented the same shortcuts and I was always changing the Spectacle defaults to them on every installation, which was tedious... With Magnet I don't have to fiddle at all.

I used xmonad on NixOS and I quite like it, but in any tiling wm on macOS I tried, I hit some issues within 5-10 minutes.

To be fair IntelliJ didn't work with xmonad out of the box either. I had to set some strange `startupHook = setWMName "LG3D"` Source: https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#P...

Love it. Have my focus app in the middle, e.g. Code or Visual Studio. One side screen can have e.g. Sublime Merge, and the other a browser for testing, or a few terminals.

* Center - main focus of work (normally an IDE) * Left - Documentation * Right - Browser/Simulator * Mac - Slack/Chat/Email/Calender

All through USBC daisy chaining? I have three display ports on a 1080TI, but it's fascinating to see how much flexibility Type C allows.

One thing to watch out for if you install two vertical side by side monitors is that many monitors (especially gaming monitors) are optimized to be watched horizontally.

That sounds weird, so let me explain:

LCD's have a sort of a "field of view": if your watch them straight (at 90 degrees), the amount of light reaching your eyes is maximum. If you look at them sideways (eg 45 degrees), the amount of light that reaches your eyes decreases (this typically happens when you look at a co-worker screen while sitting next to them).

Good LCD's have a wide field of view: you can look at them from the side and still see a good image.

But the expectation is that you will watch them from the side, not from above or below, and manufacturers have taken advantage of that fact: they optimize for a wide horizontal field of view, but the vertical field of view is, on some monitors, terrible.

It does not matter unless you mount the monitors vertically, in which case the vertical FOV becomes your horizontal FOV, and you might not even see the image on the outer edges of the monitors.

I found the SwitchResX app [1] to be really useful for switching to portrait mode on macOS. I have a 2017 13" MacBook Pro and that app made it possible to use the 27" LG UltraFine 5K display in portrait mode. I also use Spectacle [2] for moving windows around with the keyboard.

1. https://www.madrau.com/ 2. https://www.spectacleapp.com/

For eye health, have the monitors backing a window (or 20+ feet of empty space), so that you can periodically (at least every 20 minutes) look past the monitors at an "infinite" plane.

It's helps with coding, too, but scrolling is still usually necessary there.

macOS is fairly weak, being more inclined to manually accomplishing it.

MacOS is good for doing it horizontally, but you're right — there should be a mechanism for vertical tiling on portrait displays in macOS.

But I’m with you on the resolution matter. My external displays are nowhere near as pleasant to read from and use as my internal display—yet it was I that chose the two rather than one 5K or similar display. Bear in mind too, especially when dealing with laptops, that that not all hardware will be capable of driving multiple high-DPI displays. If I recall correctly, two 4K displays is supported by the Surface Book + Surface Dock, but only at 30fps. (I have the vague, unfounded impression that most laptops wouldn’t support it at all.)

It’s last update is a bit buggy, but it’s great

It really only makes sense on large screens though. If you spend a lot of time on the laptop screen overlapping windows + spectacle is better.