My screens now have areas that are 'good' and 'bad' for me

December 29, 2024

Once upon a time, I'm sure that everywhere on my screen (because it would have been a single screen at that time) was equally 'good' for me; all spots were immediately visible, clearly readable, didn't require turning my head, and so on. As the number of screens I use has risen, as the size of the screens has increased (for example when I moved from 24" non-HiDPI 3:2 LCD panels to 27" HiDPI 16:9 panels), and as my eyes have gotten older, this has changed. More and more, there is a 'good' area that I've set up so I'm looking straight at and then increasingly peripheral areas that are not as good.

(This good area is not necessarily the center of the screen; it depends on how I sit relatively to the screen, the height of the monitor, and so on. If I adjust these I can change what the good spot is, and I sometimes will do so for particular purposes.)

Calling the peripheral areas 'bad' is a relative term. I can see them, but especially on my office desktop (which has dual 27" 16:9 displays), these days the worst spots can be so far off to the side that I don't really notice things there much of the time. If I want to really look, I have to turn my head, which means I have to have a reason to look over there at whatever I put there. Hopefully it's not too important.

For a long time I didn't really notice this change or think about its implications. As the physical area covered by my 'display surface' expanded, I carried over the much the same desktop layout that I had used (in some form) for a long time. It didn't register that some things were effectively being exiled into the outskirts where I would never notice them, or that my actual usage was increasingly concentrated in one specific area of the screen. Now that I have consciously noticed this shift (which is a story for another entry), I may want to rethink some of how I lay things out on my office desktop (and maybe my home one too) and what I put where.

(One thing I've vaguely considered is if I should turn my office displays sideways, so the long axis is vertical, although I don't know if is feasible with their current stands. I have what is in practice too much horizontal space today, so that would be one way to deal with it. But probably this would give me two screens that each are a bit too narrow to be comfortable for me. And sadly there are no ideal LCD panels these days; I would ideally like a HiDPI 24" or 25" 3:2 panel but vendors don't do those.)

Written on 29 December 2024.
« In an unconfigured Vim, I want to do ':set paste' right away
I'm firmly attached to a mouse and (overlapping) windows »

Page tools: View Source.
Search:
Login: Password:

Last modified: Sun Dec 29 23:23:01 2024
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.