Wed, 12 May 2010

Dual Monitors for Productivity?

I keep seeing blogs and mainstream media stories claiming that two monitors help productivity, with just a few saying the opposite. So, having a spare monitor, I thought I’d try it out.

Lack of experience with dual monitors made me a bit slow to sort out the way to get my video card driving them both—and not in the most ideal way. It has one HDMI output, one DVI output and one VGA output and can drive them all, although using the HDMI/DVI combination resulted in a less than ideal outcome as the screen attached to the HDMI chose to treat screen blank as a synonym for a bright blue display about 80 per cent of the time. The DVI/VGA combination works, but seems wrong.

Once I had them both working, I had to decide how to use them and came up against squirrelly behaviour from Gnome, similar to the silly way Apple’s OS-X behaves: you have to chose which screen displays the panels with all the useful little gadgets you choose to have available. And, since my normal modus operandi is to use a single screen with eight Gnome desktops and about fifty open windows, I ran into other issues.

The second display is attached to the same set of desktops as the first one, but the desktop chooser thing is only on the first one. So I have to move the mouse a lot further than usual to switch desktops if I’m on the second screen. And the little desktop selector things are twice as wide as usual because the screen is twice as wide, so they are clumsy to use and don’t attract my eyes and mouse as they used to do.

So I’m not sure whether this is a good idea or not. Maybe if I was using a pair of 19-inch screens it would seem more useful than the pair of 24-inch monitors I’m using which are so wide that I have to move my head a lot to take them in.

Or maybe I need to sit with somebody using dual monitors and see how they work them. If I was doing pair programming, I could imagine that the extra screen might be very useful. Or if I played games or watched TV, I could imagine using the second screen for that stuff. But that’s not me.

Anyway, I’ve moved everything around now to fit a display that physically occupies 1,100mm of desk width in place, so I might as well play with it for a week or so to see if interesting benefits jump up and hit me in the face. And maybe I’ll put the second screen back on the shelf to gather dust until it’s needed.

Posted at: 16:25

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