
Coding Horror: Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity? - e1ven
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001076.html
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abstractbill
_Instead of incessantly dragging, sizing, minimizing and maximizing windows,
you can do actual productive work._

I have no idea what he's talking about here. My work day starts with me
opening one firefox window (full-screen), and one emacs window (also full-
screen). That's pretty much all I look at for 12 hours every day. Dragging?
Resizing? Not so much. Being productive? Yes.

~~~
sanj
I've worked that way as well, but lately I've found that I'm typing C-x b RET
a whole lot to find my way to the buffer I want to view or edit.

So I've ended up with multiple terminal windows:

\- emacs

\- mysql

\- console output

\- extra shell to fiddle in

I'm well aware that could all be in one big emacs window, but not having to
switch buffers is a worthwhile tradeoff.

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brentr
I think the answer depends on what one is actually working on.

When I worked as an equity trader, having multiple monitors was a godsend; it
eliminated the need to flip through at least five different systems all on the
same monitor.

At home, I have a Windows laptop and Mac desktop that I will often switch
between while programming, and I don't feel that using both of them at the
same time makes me anymore productive. If I am programming in C++, I will be
using Visual Studio on the laptop, and if I am programming anything else, I
will be on the Mac in vim. I would only stop to look up something on the
other, but usually if I stop to look something up it is because I am
frustrated with some problem, and at that point I usually take a break from
code just to clear my mind.

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jcl
Previous discussion of the Utah study:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134318>

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adduc
I use a laptop and desktop next to each other when I'm at home, and I like to
think I'm more productive than I'd be with just one monitor. If I'm compiling
or converting or doing something processor intensive on one computer, it's
easy to keep an api reference up on another screen for easy looking up of
functions, or any other web related issues.

