Mostly agree, but my opinion on this matter was somewhat swayed after I started using :vsp in Vim on my 13" widescreen notebook (combined with a full-screen mode in iTerm). Not only had splitting the screen vertically right in the middle helped me recover the "lost" space, but it also forced me to wrap my code consistently to 80 characters, so now it looks/prints better. I guess the moral is that sometimes a bad thing can lead to something good.
(I would generally consider the need to have 6 views of your source to get your job done a code smell, but it isn't always my code, and lately we've been doing some client/message-bus/server code where 6 starts to feel a bit constraining.)
Technically I'm still neutral on the emacs v. vim wars and they're both good editors. But looking around me, the vim users in my office really need to get better about buffer management. I'm sure vim can technically do everything emacs can do with buffers and splitting and windowing, but "nobody" seems to do it.
I use XEmacs with the 6x10 font, and can get three windows across, each 100 characters wide, all in the same frame (it takes a little fiddling to set up, but then I keep the session around a long time).
Just like desktop-save, I do C-x S instead, and it saves all open frames, and the buffers they contain (no frame size or position though, afair).
C-x F to load in the rare event I need to restart emacs.
The code is at https://github.com/nunb/revive-mode-config
I strive to stay vertically and horizontally aligned to both my keyboard and my screen.
Even though I have a 1920x1080 monitor, I keep windows stacked in the center, and use multiple emacs frames rather than one frame C-x 3'd into multiple columns.
1440 pixels wide is about what I think is ideal at 1.5 feet of separation.
It's for this reason that I can't bring myself to upgrade my Lenovo X61t. A 4:3 1440x1050 12.1" screen is vastly superior to anything available today. God, how I wish the new Lenovo tablets came in 4:3.
God, how I wish there were new 12" laptops in 4:3.
- Glossy screens (choose between touch and reflections, or less reflections but no touch) - Loss of 32 pixels vertically, for even wider display. No thanks. - Wider body. The keyboard was already full-size, a wider body helps nothing. - New battery that pops the laptop up in the back, instead of the nice flush battery that gave you a spine to grab onto in tablet mode. - Loses backcompat with the X201 UltraBase docking station - And still no HDMI.
And yet, if I want Sandy Bridge (instant gain of 20% clock speed), what're my options?
I was really looking forward to buying an X220 when they came out. Now, I'll sit and wait for some other vendor to get a proper lightweight work tablet out.
Cheap glossy screens have exactly the same issue, but more expensive glossy screens such as the ones in Apple's Macbooks or Lenovo's X1 laptop are basically a glass board right in front of the screen. So they are much more resistant against scratches and against other types of physical abuse.
Obviously it's not a tech problem, and instead a matter of convincing someone this is a wanted feature. How do you go about such a campaign?
Speaking of "out of touch" another issue with new screens is the format: On my old IBM/Lenovo X41 and X61s laptops the 4:3 screen format was perfect for the 12" screen. Although the screen was small I used the X41 as my main laptop for about half a year (without an external monitor). On my current X201 the 16:10 format is much worse: I'm a programmer, I don't need horizontal space, but vertical space. Even for non-programmers I guess that for reading web pages or other documents vertical space is also more important than horizontal space. With Lenovo's new X210 they've introduced a further step in the wrong direction by switching from 16:10 to 16:9.