If two monitors are good are three monitors better? And how?

Question

I'd be interested to hear peoples thoughts about the productivity gains (or lackof) from moving from a dual to triple monitor setup.

I find a multi-monitor setup indispensable both in the office and at home (for hobby development). Since I start dividing my time 50/50 between development and management I'm beginning to feel that I'm doing a lot more Alt+Tabbing and am considering a third monitor.

On that note - aside from installing a second graphics card are there any other solutions for a triple monitor setup?

Answer 1

I think it's diminishing returns after two, but sometimes 3 would really help (debugger, web page and DB open at once for instance)

Answer 2

E-mail and other dashboard-ish windows in one screen, code in another screen, and the application or web site under development running in the third screen. More screens can be useful for on-line docs while you code, including web sites such as this, as well as a whole monitor just for toolbars, property windows, toolboxes, and project item lists. Extra monitors are also good for displaying multiple VMs at once. File system windows such as Windows Explorer, command prompt windows, character terminals, and remote desktop windows could all be in full view in a separate monitor. Expanded spreadsheets, maps, and class diagrams, the list goes on.

Why hide everything behind tiny taskbar buttons and tabs when you can see everything with the roll of an eyeball or slight turn of head on a video wall?

Answer 3

See here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6231/programming-and-multiple-monitors#6240 where we covered the same issue :)

In regards to triple monitors and graphics cards...the only other option I've seen is the Matrox TripleHead2Go which makes your computer think your 3 monitors are one REALLY widescreen monitor.

Answer 4

I think 2 is more than enough. Three just makes my focus shift randomly, while two makes me navigate way more effectively.

Answer 5

One thing to consider for the third monitor is just running a second computer and using synergy to handle the mouse, keyboard, and clipboard. Sharing one big hard drive isn't hard and you could keep much of the load off your dev computer by running some of the office apps on the second machine. If you're developing under *nix, you can get fancier with remote x windows and things.

Answer 6

Well, you might want to get a third monitor which you can place in a vertical/portrait orientation. Since you are talking management jobs, a vertical monitor makes for a much better document reader/word processor than a horizontal/landscape one.

Yes, there definitely are benefits for 3 monitors....

Answer 7

Jeff looked at this question with a post on Coding Horror a few months ago.

Answer 8

Mostly, I end up with our company chat and my e-mail client on the right monitor, Eclipse and Firefox on the centre monitor and iTunes, the webcam of the kitchen and other miscellany on the left monitor. But when I'm debugging our Excel extension (which integrates with our Java app), I can easily end up with Eclipse, Visual Studio, Excel and Excel's VB editor all in use at the same time. Having 3 monitors is a god-send in situations like that. If none of your development work ends up looking like that, two monitors may be sufficient.

If you're using Windows and using multiple monitors: I find UltraMon really handy. It allows me to extend the task bar over all three monitors, with the tasks on a monitor appearing in that monitor's taskbar.

Answer 9

This summer I was testing a database-driven ASP.NET application. Depending on which type of testing I was doing, I would have different configurations of multiple applications from which I needed to gather information concurrently:

• Firefox, SQL Studio, Visual Studio
• NUnit, NCover, SQL Studio, Visual Studio

Add to this the normal load of Outlook, and maybe a Word doc, spreadsheet, or API docs in a browser window, and there's a lot of information to display. Reducing the application 'switch' time to just a turn of the head or a flick of the eyes has been shown to increase productivity.

Answer 10

I've got a 3-monitor setup -- 2 screens on my Mac and 1 on my Linux box.

A lot of my work is in distributed computing, so it's nice to have lots of windows open watching what's happening as the programs are interacting.

When not debugging those kinds of programs, it's nice to have an "admin" screen with email, meeting, chat, etc, in addition to the coding and viewing screens.

Answer 11

I have 3 dell screens - a 30 inch 2560x1600 in the middle and 19 inchers at 1200x1600 either side in portrait mode. The dot pitch is the same so the screens line up nicely :)

It is so useful for development work (web/C++), not only seeing a lot of information from different apps at once but being able to move very quickly between them. I got the third screen at the point I felt I was getting a bit cramped with two.

There's a great package called MaxiVista which is how I have three screens on one PC - one of them is actually connected via VGA to my laptop.. MaxiVista shows that screen in my Windows Display Properties and displays the image on the laptop over the network. Also, recently a company called DisplayLink are behind a number of different USB to VGA adaptors which let you run monitors from your USB ports.