Comment by dnmc

When I had five monitors, they each had a job. Front of me were two ultrawides on top of each other, the one directly in front of me was for 'the action' as it could handle "two screens" worth of info next to each other.

The ultra wide above was mainly dedicated to various chat programs (teams, telegram, iMessage, etc).

The laptop's screen to the left was my mail screen (both home and work).

To the right was a 4k on its side, for documentation reference or output work.

And above the laptop was a "scratch" monitor for whatever was needed (often a music player, etc).

You quickly get used to glancing at what you need and moving on; if something needs more attention it's easy to bring it front and center or turn your chair.

Power fluctuations took out the ultrawides and one of the 4ks so now I just have one supermegaultrawide with a 4k above it (still laptop for mail, "above" for chat, and main for main things).

This is why ultrawides are very comfortable, you can focus on the center region where 2x monitors likely have their edges meeting.

I do this too, and just put less-important stuff on the second monitor. Work chat, music, logs, whatever.

I have three monitors. The left and right are turned vertically. They're all 30". So the main screen is in the center and I keep slack/email/web browser with docs/info on the left and usually Twitch DJs or Spotify on the right. So usually I'm looking forward but I look left briefly throughout the day.

Why would your head always be turned to one side? Have one monitor in the middle (the main one) and secondary either left or right. Having split screen right in the middle of my field of view is ridiculously unpleasant

The proper setup is 3 monitors: [ stdout ][ stdin ][ stderr ]

I have a rotating chair (normal desk chair) and I rotate the whole chair to look at the other screen If I need to look at it for more than one second.