Do you see what I see?

I've written before about multiple-monitor setups. They're nothing new for programmers now days. However, I finally have a setup where having two monitors in portrait mode seems handier than the usual landscape mode. Before going into why, first, some specs:

• Old setup mentioned in prior post - three monitors @ 1280x1024 = 3,932,160 pixels.
• New setup - two monitors @ 1920x1080 (actually 1080x1920, to be pedantic) = 4,915,200 pixels.

So, the first gain is 125% more pixels while taking up less physical desk space thanks to the monitor stand. Here is a pic:

In clockwise order we see the two monitors displaying Windows Explorer, Outlook (the archive folder - I'm an Inbox Zero guy! :), Chrome, and Microsoft CRM. As you can see, all four windows are quite usable in size and the amount of content displayed (especially since I love small font sizes). As a test, I opened Notepad++ full screen in one monitor and using Consolas 8pt font was able to see 138 lines in the edit window, plus the menu, title and status bars. I think if I can't keep most of my methods to "one screen in length" now, I'm in the wrong business.

But the other reason I really like this setup is with the resolution I have now and the monitors in portrait orientation, setting up multiple remote desktop sessions such that they can all be seen at once at a usable resolution (say, 1024x768 each) is completely a possibility. As proof, here are four sessions into four different servers:

[Yes, I color-code my desktops to more easily tell the difference between production and our various labs, which are all VM clones of production - trust me, there is some painful history behind that statement.]

Now I can have four usable landscape windows open into servers and see them all at once. So I can easily compare between production and the labs. Or have all the related servers for a given app open at once during maintenance. Very, very cool.

But none of this would be as usable if I didn't also have some good window management software, especially since Windows, like most OSes, is prejudiced toward landscape orientation. For example, the Windows key plus the left and right arrow keys auto-size an app to the left or right half of the screen, but the Windows key plus the up and down arrows maximizes and minimizes the app instead of sending it to the top or bottom halves of the screen.

After trying bug.n and Windawesome, I landed on WinSplit Revolution. I like it because the keystrokes for sizing apps is very intuitive (to me), you can have apps memorize their position and size for when they are started again, and you can customize it but the defaults seem sane, so it is usable out of the box with no configuration. All good.

I have periodically tried out portrait mode on monitors, but the combination of lower resolutions and lack of good software support has kept me from adopting it. But now I think the time is right. If you have the capability, I'd say give it a try. Even if you tried it in the past, try it again now. You may be pleasantly surprised.