I decided it was about time to upgrade my monitor situation. For the past few years I've used a 15-inch and a 14-inch at 1024x768 to give me two windows of usable text and been very happy, but when my father and I temporarily swapped monitors for troubleshooting I realized that I had been missing a lot. You can fit an awful lot of code on a large monitor.
I thought that having a widescreen monitor in portrait/pivot/tall mode would be the most useful option. Instead of having the monitor be extra wide, rotate it around and have it be extra tall. While this isn't terribly useful for web pages or video games, it seems like a fantastic idea for programming: you can still fit 80 characters across, but instead of 35 lines down, you suddenly get 70 or 80 - that's double the code!
Monitors with rotating stands are uncommon, but I found a 22-inch HP w2207 in town and set it up. It's a very nice monitor: glossy screen, heavy base, easy rotation, DVI and VGA inputs, plus two USB ports and speakers. It's native resolution is 1680x1050, which in portrait/pivot/tall mode is twice as many pixels high as a 15/14-inch monitor in 1024x768, and slightly wider. Great.
Problem 1: rotating the display to present correctly is hit-or-miss and
annoying at best. Make sure you video card driver supports the "Resize, Rotate
and Reflection" (RANDR) extension; an easy way to check is to look at the
output of xdpyinfo:
$ xdpyinfo | grep RANDR
RANDR
xorg's nv drivers do, its radeon drivers do not, and in any case, you may
not currently use RANDR with XINERAMA, the extension that allows you to
treat multiple monitors as one. If you don't use XINERAMA, you need to run
multiple window managers and can't share windows or the clipboard between them
- that's annoying.
Rotating with the command-line utility xrandr is easy, but I found when
rotating back that my xterm's fonts were screwy - sometimes way too big,
sometimes way too small. I bound a script to flip screen orientation to the
Windows key (most useful it's ever been), but I found that depending on what I
wanted to do, the widescreen might have been more convenient, and flipping the
display and the physical screen was just more effort than it was worth.
Problem 2: a 22-inch portrait/pivot/tall is just too big. My neck hurt from moving my head up and down to read, and the difference in color and picture quality on different parts of the monitor becomes very apparent when you switch back and forth between the top of the screen and the bottom.
However, when the screen was in pivot/portrait/tall mode, and I was hacking away in vim with the taglist and vimproject plugins providing sidebars, it worked great until my neck started hurting. Maybe if I had gone with a 19-inch widescreen it would have been better, but I ended up taking the HP w2207 back and getting the less expensive and less featureful 22-inch Acer AL2216W.
Besides not having a pivoting stand, the big difference between the two is that the AL2216W does not have a glossy screen. I've decided that I prefer the traditional matte screen instead of the glossy one; while movies certainly look better on a glossy screen, I found it harder to read text and it was very distracting to see my face in the mirror the entire time I used the monitor. The effect was annoying with background lighting, but when I opened the window it was just unbearable.
As for fitting 80 characters of text per line, I found that with a 12 point DejaVu Sans Mono I could fit two windows side-by-side perfectly. Even better, I could have vim open on one half of the screen and split the other half between two windows - maybe a window for compiling, an interactive REPL, quick documentation, revision control, whatever. It's great.
Without the need for RANDR, I can go back to using XINERAMA and use two
monitors conveniently. The second monitor is still invaluable for tasks like
web browsing, email, and especially for API documentation.
As Ferd said, "Alec, welcome to the 90s."