Has there been any research into the effects of turning your monitor to portrait (e.g. 1024x1280) rather than landscape? I have my work monitor set up this way and it’s so much better for pretty much everything I do with it. Landscape is good for watching movies from across the room, but PDFs and terminals and web pages and spreadsheets and documents in general work very well indeed in portrait.
ETA: I set younger teen’s PC up this way and she refused to go back to landscape. She’s a complete and utter technophobe whose usage pattern is social media, YouTube and Windows Live Chat. I don’t think she even bothers swivelling it back for movies. I recommend people try it and see if they like it.
I like it but I tend to go back and forth. Multiple windows in Emacs are more clearly distinguished if they’re side-by-side instead of one below the other. And Inkscape fails to take advantage of portrait-mode—it puts a crucial toolbar to the right of the workspace, so you get a very tall, very narrow workspace in portrait-mode.
I have a really big monitor and like to have three buffers open side-by-side (plus the directory listing)… which lets me see models, view and controller side-by-side (or thing and thing_spec, depending on what I’m working on).
I am to the point now where I basically need to have two windows open side-by-side if I’m working in emacs, ever. Even if they’re open to the same buffer, it feels Right. The only problem is that they both end up with some unused horizontal space, because most things I edit don’t have very long lines. Anybody know what to do with the extra horizontal space? Speedbar, perhaps?
Large monitors would have mechanical and safety problems in portrait modes, or would need much heavier and bulkier support.
Windows 7 and KDE (sadly not OSX) automatically resize windows to half-screen-x/full-screen-y if you drag them to left and right. That means you can often use your monitor as two smaller portrait monitors (my 2560x1600 usually has two 1280x1600 windows, or a bit less due to start bar), but when you need full screen for something it’s available.
If the mount swivels, the monitor’s designed for it (e.g. my work one—somehow I snagged the only swivelling monitor in the whole office). Failing that, it can often be remounted vertically with minor screwdriver attention (e.g. my monitors at my previous job). Weight really isn’t that much of an issue with LCDs, particulary compared to CRTs. (Have you ever slung two 19″ Sun monitors (34kg each) about, repeatedly as part of your job? Me neither, we had Windows admins for that sort of thing. Never go into Unix admin without a dodgy back.)
Has there been any research into the effects of turning your monitor to portrait (e.g. 1024x1280) rather than landscape? I have my work monitor set up this way and it’s so much better for pretty much everything I do with it. Landscape is good for watching movies from across the room, but PDFs and terminals and web pages and spreadsheets and documents in general work very well indeed in portrait.
ETA: I set younger teen’s PC up this way and she refused to go back to landscape. She’s a complete and utter technophobe whose usage pattern is social media, YouTube and Windows Live Chat. I don’t think she even bothers swivelling it back for movies. I recommend people try it and see if they like it.
I like it but I tend to go back and forth. Multiple windows in Emacs are more clearly distinguished if they’re side-by-side instead of one below the other. And Inkscape fails to take advantage of portrait-mode—it puts a crucial toolbar to the right of the workspace, so you get a very tall, very narrow workspace in portrait-mode.
me too, though I’m a vim user.
I have a really big monitor and like to have three buffers open side-by-side (plus the directory listing)… which lets me see models, view and controller side-by-side (or thing and thing_spec, depending on what I’m working on).
I am to the point now where I basically need to have two windows open side-by-side if I’m working in emacs, ever. Even if they’re open to the same buffer, it feels Right. The only problem is that they both end up with some unused horizontal space, because most things I edit don’t have very long lines. Anybody know what to do with the extra horizontal space? Speedbar, perhaps?
Maybe you could open up a third window for the second buffer, and yoke the other two of them to the first buffer using follow-mode?
Large monitors would have mechanical and safety problems in portrait modes, or would need much heavier and bulkier support.
Windows 7 and KDE (sadly not OSX) automatically resize windows to half-screen-x/full-screen-y if you drag them to left and right. That means you can often use your monitor as two smaller portrait monitors (my 2560x1600 usually has two 1280x1600 windows, or a bit less due to start bar), but when you need full screen for something it’s available.
If the mount swivels, the monitor’s designed for it (e.g. my work one—somehow I snagged the only swivelling monitor in the whole office). Failing that, it can often be remounted vertically with minor screwdriver attention (e.g. my monitors at my previous job). Weight really isn’t that much of an issue with LCDs, particulary compared to CRTs. (Have you ever slung two 19″ Sun monitors (34kg each) about, repeatedly as part of your job? Me neither, we had Windows admins for that sort of thing. Never go into Unix admin without a dodgy back.)
I don’t follow this at all.
Higher center of gravity, though I don’t have a feeling for how tall a monitor would have to be for this to be a problem.
If it pivots about the center of the screen, wouldn’t it necessarily have the same center of gravity? That’s how my monitor at work works, anyway.
That makes sense—I was thinking about finding a way to stand a landscape-oriented monitor on its edge rather than a sensible built-in feature.
Ah, yeah, that does sound ill-advised. Maybe that’s what the earlier comment was thinking too.