Nonstandard monitor setups

Russell blogs about his new 22” cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17” Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I’ve been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn’t what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12” wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels are noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I’ve been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17” Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I’m happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It’s quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it’s similar to having the ol’ regular layout.
I’d still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Comments

Rob Hart 2007-04-06 02:43:46

Re: Nonstandard monitor setups

You might be interested in this setup I’m using at the moment. Short version: One portrait monitor, and one landscape monitor. Seems to work very well for me.

http://www.bathterror.free-online.co.uk/archives/2007/04/06/index.html