To be fair, he seems to have enough space for code. horizontally at least. Monitors today have plenty of space for random crap. But the bottleneck isn't real estate anymore, it's focus.

What we need is for the other windows to gradually fade out when focus is in this one for a while. One of the video plugins/sites on tv-links had this feature - as you watched a show for a while the rest of the screen would gradually fade out.

Or we could go with two vertical panes: http://akkartik.name/desktop.html :)