Is the recent trend toward widescreen (16:9) computer monitors a plus or minus for programmers?
- by DanM
It's almost gotten to the point where you can't buy a conventional (4:3) monitor anymore. Pretty much everything is widescreen. This is fine for watching movies or TV, but is it good or bad for programming?
My initial thoughts on the issue are that widescreens are a net negative for programmers. Here are some of the disadvantages I see:
Poor space utiliziation
One disadvantage of widescreens you can't argue with is that they offer poor space utilization for the amount of total pixels you get. For example, my Thinkpad, which I bought just before the widescreen craze, has a 15" monitor with a native resolution of 1600 x 1200. The newer 15.4" Thinkpads run at most 1680 x 1050. So (if you do the math) you get fewer pixels in a wider (but not shorter) package. With desktop monitors, you pay a price in terms of desk space used. Two 1680 x 1050 monitors will simply take up more of your desk than two 1600 x 1200 monitors (assuming equal dot pitch).
More scrolling
If you compare a 1680 x 1050 monitor to a 1600 x 1200 monitor, you get 80 extra pixels of width but 150 fewer pixels of height. The height reduction means you lose approximately 11 lines of code. That's less you can see on the screen at one time and more scrolling you have to do. This harms productivity, maybe not dramatically, but insidiously.
Less room for wide panels
Widescreens also mean you lose space for wide but short panels common in programming environments. If you use Visual Studio, for example, your code window will be that much shorter when viewing the Find Results, Task List, or Error List (all of which I use frequently). This isn't to say the 80 pixels of extra width you get with widescreen would never be useful, but I tend to keep my lines of code short, so seeing more lines would be more valuable to me than seeing fewer, longer lines.
What do you think?
Do you agree/disagree? Are you now using one or more widescreen monitors for development? What resolution are you running on each? Do you ever miss the height of the traditional 4:3 monitor? Would you complain if your monitors were one inch narrower but two inches taller?
