This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Lee Carver

Hi. I’m Lee. I am a big screen bigot.

For decades, I wanted more and more screen space. I now have a setup for my desktop work that fills my visual field. Some incremental improvements would be nice, but it’s hard to do a lot better. I’m constantly amazed at people who seem to live their entire lives through a 6.1 inch diagonal screen.

We’re Only Human

Large format high quality computer monitors are not cheap. It would be good to have some objective basis for these expenses. We also know that the people with the least experience think they are the experts. Some objective information from human factor research can help avoid the worst of biases.

Some of these observations come from past reading. Some are easily confirmed with an Internet search. Some of these are purely anecdotal, based on my own experiences. Regardless, I’m able to use them as a sound basis to justify the results I like.

Observations About Human Vision

For best results, we want a display system that works well with human vision. Human vision has a few idiosyncrasies, and working with these gives the best results.

The human eye has a total visual field of about 200° horizontal and 135° vertical.° But this is not uniform. Because of the nose, only the central 120° is binocular.

High resolution foveal vision is much narrower, but our brains trick us into a full visual field. The effective resolution of the human eye is about 1 arcminute, or 60 pixels per degree.

Our eyes do not scan this space uniformly. The way ChatCPT put it was “vision-science people [know]: our vertical eye movement range is more comfortable and broader than horizontal scanning, which often needs head motion once you get past a certain lateral extent.” Its primary citation even exists.

Another concern with very large screens is the varying distance of your eye from the screen. With a flat panel screen, my eyes will be 21” from the center and 30” from the edges. Especially at that close range, I feel my eyes refocusing to handle the 9” change in distance (+42% change).

Observations About Problem Solving

People can’t really multi-task.

At best, you can have some good task switching habits.

Immersive focus is an essential part of creative and knowledge based tasks. For software engineering, I want to see all of the data and all the code possible. I want to be able to fill my visual field with information to better understand their relationships.

If you do need to take a break, it’s best to leave everything in place. If stuff needs to be put away, with the next task to be unpacked, it is hard to be productive.

Multiple desktops provide a way to leave most of your interrupted computer work in an idle state.

History

I’ve been trying to write software since I discovered it was a thing.

In the early 1970’s, it was hard to make anything happen. Pencil and paper concepts were about as good as I could manage. But I was there as a user as our modern video systems developed.

Very early on, I got to use an IBM 5100 to write some APL programs. It had a 5 inch display offering 16 lines with 64 characters. I also used punch cards and teletypes. Mostly, you looked at printouts. I drank the koolaid that was available.

With the early 80’s and into the PC era, the 13 inch monochrome monitor was becoming standard. EGA was just beginning. Technical support for video monitors was minimal. X11 comes later in the decade and Windows 3.0 starts the next decade.

In the late 1980, I got a job at Boeing Aerospace. We were developing some software engineering tools, and I get this “huge” 21 inch grey-scale monitor. It is a revelation. I can see an entire page of text on the screen, so the compromise with printing out the code to review it has changed.

In 1990, I moved to another Seattle technology company. It took me a while to get back to being comfortable with their PC grade monitors. Even with color XGA, a 14 inch screen is small.

Fortunately, video standards were advancing, with EGA becoming VGA, XGA, and DVI. At one point, I had two 20 inch CRT monitors on a desk. It took two desktop computers and a sturdy desk to make it work, but I loved the productivity boost from all the screen real estate.

In 2004, I joined Google. Thanks to enlightened senior management, all software engineers got two 24 inch flat screen monitors connected to a powerful Linux workstation. This was another revelation about what is possible with video systems. A single desktop that spanned the screens was wonderful, compared to two separate screens. This koolaid was much better.

For several years, this was pretty much everyone’s standard. The screens got incrementally bigger. By 2014, dual 27 inch monitors were conventional at better development companies. I kept mine slanted, at a V, to reduce the variation in distance across my visual field.

Dual horizontal monitors were the widespread convention when I noticed a junior engineer put one monitor vertical and the other vertical. Another revelation. He used the vertical monitor for coding tasks, and the horizontal monitor for other daily tasks.

Amazing as it was, my mind leapt forward with possibilities. I’d seen Google’s Holodeck, with a wall of vertical monitors arranged to surround you. Using dozens of monitors would be out of reach, but three vertical monitors fills your vision if you sit in one place.

What I Have Now

The opening image, repeated here, captures the basic configuration.

What you see are 3 Dell UltraSharp 27” monitors set up vertically, arranged in a soft curve. The curve follows a 21 inch radius centered at my chair. This minimizes the need to refocus as my eyes scan across the visual field.

These are the 2016 version, with 2560×1440 resolution (QHD). It’s a lot more bits than 2K (2048×1080), but not the 4K (3840×2160) we get today. The effective screen size is 4320×2560, just under what Tom’s Hardware calls a 5K resolution (5120×2880).

Some math says the screens fill about 110° horizontally and 55° vertically. The human eye’s resolution is roughly 60 pixels per degree or a potential of 6600×3300 receptor pixels. More math says the screens have more than 50% of the potentially viewable pixels.

For reference, a 12 inch laptop screen that is sitting on a desk 21 inches away fills only 17° horizontally and 16° vertically. These three 27 inch screens fill everything except my peripheral vision.

Although this arrangement is sometimes awkward with spreadsheets and those applications that insist on being wide, it is great for looking at code. Physically, each screen has roughly the same number of square inches as three sheets of 8.5×11 paper. It’s possible to display over 1,000 lines of code on these screens.

How To Use It

As delightful as I find this three monitor system, there are some practical considerations.

The first consideration is a computer system that supports triple monitors. This has been a requirement of all of my workstations. Many laptops will drive three monitors, preferably with the minimum number of adapters.

When I first configured a system with triple monitors, I could not get to all of the information fast enough. My rapid head swivels from left to right and reverse led to a few trips to the chiropractor.

Perhaps I could have developed neck strength. I did learn to slow down slightly on horizontal scanning in either direction. I also learned to organize my workspaces with vertical data for easy vertical scanning.

Regardless of the number of monitors, multiple desktops are an essential component of my work. The screens serve as one desktop, slightly ignoring the bevels for each monitor. With a few key strokes or mouse gestures, I can move between a communication desktop for email or a coding desktop with an active debugger.

Future Upgrades

For the last few years, I’ve been happy with three high resolution monitors. The resolution approaches the limits of human perception. I don’t play any first person shooter (FPS) games, but I suspect it would be awesome.

The latest Dell UltraSharps are roughly comparable to mine. Their $440 U2724D is the same brilliant IPS Black at 2560×1440 resolution that I use. Maybe a little faster. The UltraSharp 32 6K looks awesome with 61544×345 pixels, but it is flat, small, and expensive. A 30 inch monitor at full 4K resolution might be a good replacement for the individual screens, but it is not available.

Curved monitors are interesting, but their radius is far too big. If I believe ChapCPT, the best out there have a one meter curvature radius, and most are out at a two meter radius. With the three-monitor set up that I use, the effective radius is about half a meter. I can move those curved screens out to 1 or 2 meters, but then they are far away.

I’ve been experimenting with projected screens (VR/AR), and the XREAL One Pro is a fun start in a long anticipated direction.
I’ve written about that video experience separately,
and its a good starting point. But their ultrawide mode is projected as a flat screen and is only 1080 vertical. For practical purposes, it is a wonderfully mobile screen with 1920×1080 resolution.

More screens seems unlikely to be an improvement for personal productivity. For focused knowledge work, these monitors display all the information that my human visual system can handle. The 10 foot by 10 foot wall of computer screens on some TV shows might be ok for monitoring large industrial processes, but I can’t see how it would be useful for my daily work.

Modern video GPUs have no problem with multiple monitors. Up to a limit. GPUs seem to work with an 8K (7680 × 4360) virtual space that gets carved up for individual monitors. For me, this means that the practical limit for a commodity video card is three 4K monitors, and one 4K VR.

TLDR

Yeah, the summary is at the bottom. It’s a blog, not a memo.

Think about our human capabilities when you pick your own display system. There are some wonderful human strengths to take advantage of.

Three screens are great, and it comes very close to saturating the human visual field.

I am unrepentant, and I remain a big screen bigot.