
Web content fits better on a tall monitor - wmat
http://www.dailydot.com/technology/vertical-monitor-setup/
======
edw519
Or, if you're a programmer, this:

    
    
      ============================================== 
      |                                            |
      |            ---------------------           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |     (webpage)     |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            |                   |           |
      |            ---------------------           |
      |                                            |
      ==============================================
    

becomes this:

    
    
      ============================================== 
      |                                            |
      | -------------------- --------------------  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |     (webpage)    | |      (code)      |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | |                  | |                  |  |
      | -------------------- --------------------  |
      |                                            |
      ==============================================

~~~
andrey-p
Your comment is worth a thousand words.

This is true of pretty much any line of work that requires to-ing and fro-ing
between things - translation (source language / target language), graphic
design (draw area / toolbars) etc.

Pretty much the only use for a vertical screen placement I can think of is
browsing, as written in the article. Or, arguably, something like unobtrusive
writing.

------
mmcconnell1618
Humans have almost 180 degrees field of view horizontally and 135 degrees
vertically.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view))
Wide screen makes more sense. Put two browsers next to each other on a wide
screen and you're no longer have the empty bands shown in the article.

If you need to see more vertical real estate on a site use a higher resolution
monitor or a larger one. Biology gave us a wide screen field of view. Use it.

~~~
Bud
Nope. Neutralized by the fact that our language is read top-to-bottom. Thus,
so is all content. And eyes don't actually read lines of text well if they are
18 inches wide, it turns out. Which is why books are, by and large, printed in
vertical orientations.

~~~
Leszek
Though if you open a book, you actually have a landscape view of two pages,
side-by-side.

~~~
dllthomas
Until you fold one half of it around back.

------
lwh
Their basic argument is true but they completely ignore the fact that you can
have two windows side by side on a wider screen monitor. Another issue they
don't mention is some LCDs have shit viewing angles and if you are staring at
them that way the colours differ from the middle to the ends. It sure would be
nice if they brought back 4:3 though.

------
dkopi
TL;DR: webpages can look better and contain more information if your screen is
portrait instead of landscape.

Personally, I'm afraid about the ergonomics of such a setup. Our necks and
eyes are better built for looking left and right. not up and down.

------
GIFtheory
Unfortunately, last I checked, most OSes don't properly handle subpixel
antialiasing on monitors in non-standard orientations. They use the assumption
that the red subpixel is to the left of the right one, which is violated when
you rotate the monitor. See here, for example:
[http://superuser.com/questions/265413/portrait-monitor-
orien...](http://superuser.com/questions/265413/portrait-monitor-orientation-
causes-text-blurring).

~~~
lincolnq
Yes, but with 4k monitors, we no longer need subpixel antialiasing. Just
disable it!

------
wmat
As a user of dual monitors, one vertical and one horizontal, I have to admit,
there's nothing that makes me happier than full screen Vim on the vertical 23"
monitor.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
I use that configuration too. Which Linux distro do you use? I have found that
not all of them seem to support that configuration (or at least, I could never
set it with Ubuntu... OpenSUSE does support it fine though).

~~~
yourad_io
Ubuntu's control panel (gnome-settings) has never failed me for this (12.04+)
and if you're into kinky CLI commands, xrandr is your friend. It is a sane
wrapper that helps you configure your displays in an almost natural language:

    
    
        xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 1024x768 --rotate 180 \
          --output VGA1 --mode 640x480 --right-of eDP1
    

(From memory, dont paste this to the bank)

------
falcolas
This has never worked out (for me) the way people think it does. When I'm
reading, I'm not looking at the entire document all at once, I'm looking at
one line of the document. And if I have to start craning my neck in one
direction or the other to see the whole thing (24" creates a lot of space to
look at when an arms length away), it will start to hurt. Better, IMO, to take
advantage of the horizontal space with a few split text windows for side by
side viewing and be "resigned" to do a bit of scrolling.

------
bshimmin
Probably most people here are smart enough to understand the benefits and
drawbacks without reading this article at all, but here's a TLDR: if you
routinely look at one long web page at at time (and aren't worried about
straining your neck), then you might be better served orienting your monitor
vertically.

------
applecore
Good luck trying this with a 16:9 display. When it's rotated, a 1920×1080
resolution just isn't wide enough.

~~~
rayiner
Any website that isn't happy with 700-800 pixels horizontally is broken (I'm
looking at you Westlaw). Narrow columns of text are just better:
[http://www.ninjapost.com/blog/on-the-importance-of-narrow-
co...](http://www.ninjapost.com/blog/on-the-importance-of-narrow-columns).

~~~
scarygliders
I find I like things the opposite way - if I want to read narrow columns of
text, I'll read a newspaper. My browser is not a newspaper, however, and I
prefer sites that expand to fit the browser's width.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that sites that enforce this kind of narrow
text (an exaggeration in order to make a point I must confess), to be entirely
off-putting, and liable to lose a reader, and to have their bounce rate
increased. These types of sites usually have huge columns of white space at
either side of their text - space which could be put to better use displaying
text, rather than trying to dictate my browsing/reading experience.

~~~
rayiner
We're talking about layouts that prevent you from making the window narrower
than 1080 pixels.

------
newsb
Behold, the best of both worlds:
[http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.ht...](http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/index.html)

The Eizo EV2730Q is my dream monitor made real. I never thought it would be
made in a consumer market but it's really here. Crossing my fingers for a
North American release and at a price that's < $1000. Ideally I would have
preferred 2560x2048 (exactly 4x my current monitor of 1280x1024) but I'll take
what I can get.

------
scarygliders
I have a dual-monitor set-up - both widescreen - mounted on a dual monitor
arm.

I trialled turning the left monitor 90 degrees so that I run Pycharm on the
left monitor in a portrait orientation.

It works fine when you're coding. The only trouble was the arrangement kind of
triggers some latent OCD in me and I couldn't tolerate the asymmetry for long
;)

So it was back to the symmetric widescreen arrangement.

I didn't try putting both monitors at 90 degrees though. Perhaps I should -
although the widescreen arrangement is needed for playing Elite: Dangerous ;)

------
scottjad
Biggest benefit of portrait is you can instantly subconsciously see more about
how long the article is. This is really most useful in the cases when the end
of the article is visible on the first screenful in portrait mode and it
wouldn't have been visible in landscape mode. This gives one a pleasurable
immediate knowledge of how long the article is, how soon it's going to wrap
up, etc. It was also quite nice in the Google Reader UI where you could get an
idea of what was coming next.

But that comes at several costs. One is that text is less frequently at your
optimal reading height. Often the text will be too high or too low for
comfortable reading. So you end up having to either scroll frequently with a
mouse wheel or touchpad or say scroll say half page at a time with the
keyboard.

Having text at a non-optimal height is also annoying when using text editors
in this portrait mode. Sure you can see more, but more often what you want to
edit or read closely will be too high or too low unless you use C-l (emacs
binding) frequently to center it.

Also, for those people who haven't given up their mouse yet, it can be very
annoying to move the mouse this much distance. If you have part of a UI at the
top (say tabs, menus, toolbar etc) and then part of a UI at the bottom (say
find box or start menu or media player controls or) then moving the mouse that
distance can be an annoyance.

And even if you don't use a mouse, then you will now have crucial parts of the
UI (like minibuffer or mode-line or gnuscreen status line) at the very bottom
of the screen in an uncomfortable-to-read position.

Overall from my experience I loved it for getting an overview of webpages, for
Google Reader, or seeing entire pdf pages at once, but not much else.

------
mikeash
The problem isn't widescreen monitors, the problem is full screen UIs that
don't need to be full screen. The benefit of widescreen isn't that your
content can be super wide, it's that you can view multiple pieces of
reasonably wide content simultaneously. If I turned my monitors sideways I'd
severely impact that ability.

------
briHass
I've found vertical-oriented monitors to be just 'blah' for what I do
(Windows/C# development.) Many of the Windows IDEs out there seem to realize
that monitors are wider than they are tall, so various tool panels in the tool
are on the right and left of the editor. Between the space used up for line
numbers, breakpoints, resharper annotations, and other trim on the left, plus
the solution explorer (file tree) on the right, there's only about enough room
for 100-120 character lines in the editor.

My IDEs are about the only thing that I run full-screen. The other monitors
have multiple windows open, sometimes docked split left-right and sometimes
slightly overlapping. Windows makes this easier with left-right auto dock,
where it doesn't have up-down docking.

------
raldi
Actually, I think the real problem is people using their _smartphones_ wrong
this whole time: I think the endless push toward ever-larger phones is due to
a lack of encouragement from the marketing and UI for using the things in the
usually-far-more-readable landscape mode.

~~~
marcosdumay
For me, the largest benefit of a big smartphone is more space for the
keyboard.

And, of course, add to this that lots of sites are broken and will not work
well in landscape mode.

------
notacoward
It totally depends on what you're doing. Landscape is the clear winner for
video. Some people like having one tall window for reading/writing code,
though I (and most other competent programmers I know) would just as soon have
multiple windows/panes side by side in landscape. The one case where portrait
clearly wins is web pages that fail to take advantage of greater width with
multiple columns etc. That's not me failing to use my monitor properly. That's
the _website designer_ failing to use my window properly. If designers weren't
such twits about making things look decent only in their own preferred setup,
portrait mode would never make sense for me.

------
tbrownaw
Or, y'know, you could have two (or more) non-maximized windows side by side.

------
kalleboo
It's kind of jarring to see screenshots of full-screened web pages.

This may betray my 90's Mac heritage (since until somewhat recently Mac OS
window management hasn't even supported full-screen) I think the only things
I've ever full-screened in my life are (1) videos (2) photo editing.

When I'm browsing and messing around, I have my browser surrounded by chat
windows, when I'm working I have terminal windows, documentation and notes
spread around.

Anyway on wide screens I can suggest putting your dock on the right side of
the screen instead of the bottom to make more efficient use of space.

------
andrewstuart2
Portrait-oriented monitors are pretty indispensable to me, ever since I saw
somebody using his monitor vertically a couple years ago. Terminal output is
more readable vertically, config files are easier too (very short lines), and
if you stick to the pretty typical 80 characters for code files, you fit 2x
more in the same window.

I use a tiling window manager to maximize usability, and go for the old
standby tie-fighter monitor configuration.

The major loss in most cases is viewing angle, though. It's hard to get
somebody to check code with me if it's invisible from their desk.

------
pdpi
Of course, you should be aware that sub-pixel rendering is not available in
portrait mode. Also, wide screens are pretty decent if you're not in the habit
of having every single window maximised. Putting things side by side works
fine!

~~~
nlawalker
Yes! I was hoping I'd see at least one comment about this. I tried portrait
mode once and everything looked like crap, and I realized it's because
ClearType couldn't be tuned to handle the pixel layout for a rotated monitor.

------
bluedino
I'm waiting for EIZO's 1920x1920 EV2730Q, a 1:1 display.

------
eliben
No, thanks. A wide enough monitor and I can show three buffers in Vim
horizontally fitting >80 cols in each using reasonable font size. As a
programmer, this is invaluable.

------
djf1
sure, this might make the most sense for web pages, but for programming, I
prefer to view my files in columns, and landscape maximizes the number of
columns on the screen.

------
sogen
I remember a pic of John Carmarck coding on a huge rotated monitor, but my
google-fu powers are failing me and can't find the pic.

------
yourad_io
Yes, you have been using your monitor wrong. Try a tilling wm and you'll never
go back.

------
zobzu
tbh i like widescreen as i can stack 2 pages of 2 different things. (like 1
terminal + 1 doc) i dont spent my day reading the news tho so there's that...

------
rayiner
WIN-LEFT, or WIN-RIGHT.

