Give all developers two monitors now! May 17, 2006
Posted by James Webster in : development , trackbackWould you rather develop like this…
…or like this?
You can go read this NYTimes article (login required) or you can take it from me. The productivity benefit from using an additional screen, paired with a modern IDE (IntelliJ is my weapon of choice), far outweighs the measly $couple o’ hundred that a 19″ panel costs these days. And with Matrox’s Dual Head 2 Go solution, adding a second video card isn’t necessary. This is especially handy in corporate environments where getting permission to open up a case can sometimes be like pulling teeth. Boss won’t buy you another monitor? Maybe its worthwhile exercising the initiative and getting one yourself; it would be a lousy boss who didn’t reimburse you once the benefits have been demonstrated.
I have worked with extreme programming teams in the past where all workstations were configured in this manner. If you have LCD panels that can be rotated 90 degrees, give it a go for the the monitor that is dedicated to showing the code; editing code in portrait mode makes much better use of the available screen real-estate. Since most teams establish a coding standard where the maximum allowable line width is around 80-120 characters this often results in wasted whitespace on the right-hand side of the monitor. Portrait mode will let you see more of the class/module/script/markup on screen at once, hopefully almost all of it if you are writing small cohesive classes.
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By coincidence, I just posted on this:
http://kylecordes.com/2006/05/15/dual-monitors/
My current hunch is that two is the *minimum* number of monitor to use for development, next time I might go for 3, depending on their size.
[…] Seth Livingston blogs about the value of virutalization in development (via VMTN Blog). As Seth points out, it is possible to build up a development VM with all the common tools that have been agreed upon and develop solely within that environment. This is a great idea; especially when you also consider that some tools aren’t the greatest in sharing key bindings, template shortcuts, etc. The most recent version of IntelliJ in particular has this problem; there is no easy way to share Live Templates and additional key bindings via source control without further complications. I would love to be able to develop in a VM for this reason alone. But can my virtual development box also support dual monitors? Unfortunately dual-monitor support for guest OS’s appears to be missing from the VMware Workstation data-sheet. […]
Personally I use “Split Tab Group Vertically” on the IntelliJ editor context menu, and then stretch the window to cover both screens (by default the divider will match up with the monitor boundary). Something similar is possible in Eclipse. I find the editor panes are more important than anything else; I tend to quickly dispose of other tool windows after using them with Shift+F12. Being able to see two whole files at once is great.
I’ve always believed in large screens, but I was initially sceptical about dual-screen; I thought it was a cheap approximation to what I really wanted - a huge multi-megapixel panel. However, I’ve had two screens per pair for my last three projects and I liked them a lot. I now doubt that I could justify the massive cost of a 30″ LCD over two 20″ LCD monitors.
One other thing: it’s not just developers who need two screens, the whole delivery team should have them. The best working environment I’ve seen has lots of pairing stations, all with two screens. There are no allocated desks and business analysts and QAs are mixed up with the developers. We can all benefit, so just don’t bother making a distinction.
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