Selfelected

Tilt your extra monitor to portrait

I, of course, have two monitors for my development computer.  (sometimes three but that is subject for another post)  The extra monitor I have is tilted to portrait so it is higher than wide.  I strongly recommend it.

We write code with the flow going from the top to the bottom.  Having a high monitor makes me see more code and keep less in the RAM part of the brain.

One could argue that methods should be short and there hence is no need for a screen that is so high that two methods are visible at once.  One could also argue that cars should be fragile so as to feel the need for avoiding collisions. Or calculators to calculate wrongly so we learn to do it manually instead.

Try tilting your extra monitor to portrait today!  You might not like it – hacking queries is better done wide, spreadsheets is often wide, presentations are wide – but then you have your other landscape monitor for that.

You might have to rearrange some tools in your favourite development environment but that is easy done.

I dare you to try it and leave a comment.

Short review: Lilliput USB monitor

Small and expensive but totally worth it if you need a third screen for your laptop.

If you are only using one monitor and satisfied with it there are bigger and better monitors to have for less money.  But if you, as me, only have a dual head video card and already two monitors the lilliput makes the day.

I have it for keeping an eye on email or chat or spotify or logs or perfmon or whatever needs little space at the side of my main monitor.

Easy installation in Win7 and it pops up as an ordinary video card.  No pesky dialogs floating around.