For the sake of context, here’s what I have used in term of monitors over the years:

  • Two 1280*1024 monitors. Meh.
  • Three (!) 1280.1024 monitors. Quite nice actually, when you used to only have two, but by 2014, a lot of applications started to feel cramped in there.

From 2016, I got to work from a laptop with 2 external 24” monitors, so three total. One for the browser, one for the IDE, and a third one to bind them all in the instant messaging darkness. To add to the darkness, I somehow landed a powerful workstation laptop specced with a 15.6” monitor with 720p resolution, which was clearly suboptimal, but sufficient as extra monitor real estate.

I have been using this setup for 2 and a half year, and been quite satisfied, but still, I found it to be too big, in term of size, and at the same time too small, in that I wanted more directly under my eyes. So for some time, I have been looking at the huge 43” 4k monitors (basically TVs with standard monitor connectivity). I was thinking, “yeah, it’s like having four full HD 21 inches in a quad setup, this should rock !”, with the plan to ask for an upgrade at work.

Getting the beast

In the meantime, business beeing business, I started working directly from a client office, on provided hardware, and stopped thinking about it, when a 4K monitor, in the form of a Samsung LU28E590DS 28 inches popped on my supervisor desk to help test website issues at high resolution. So, after a while of seeing it taking dust on his desk because he mostly uses his laptop, and a little bit of nagging, I lifted it when he was on holiday :)

Now comes the interesting part of setting it up to work with my laptop. I naïvely thought, that my laptop display port would do the trick, but unfortunately, not at 60Hz. And honestly, seeing your mouse cursor teleport from place to place loses its appeal real fast. So after a bit of fiddling and web crawling, I settled on the very simple solution of using the picture in picture mode of the monitor (split in two vertically), with the display port and the HDMI, and boom, two virtual 1980*2160@60Hz monitors. Sweet.

How it is

In short. Great! I moved the monitor closer to me, and use a 125% scaling. In term of use, not at all how I thought it would go. I’m using it as dual big vertical monitors. And that is nice! For web browsing, it’s fantastic. I’m using back the vertical layout for mails that I used on smaller monitor, and find it much more natural. Same goes for my RSS feed reader. For my IDE, it is great as well, showing as much code as I need without scrolling. The snap-in feature of Windows makes it quick if I want to tile my windows (my editor is tiled below a video right now).

Some great use cases I found for now :

  • Any kind of reading or documentation. Widescreen is NOT meant for reading efficiently.
  • Terminal : Vertical rhymes with terminal, and for good reason.
  • IDE : Again, vertical is king: either your code is long, or you pop-up a big toolbar.

Conclusion

  • 4k is gorgeous
  • A lot of 4k monitors support dual input, and that may be more pratical if you want to tile your windows (or your computer does not support a single 4k output at a decent refresh rate).
  • I thought I would be using more windows, where in fact I’m using bigger windows, and loving it (especially the web browser and IDE)
  • VERTICAL LAYOUT! This is the best change so far. Coupled with the high resolution, it makes so much more apps much more usable. Careful, I’m endorsing here my 8:9 ratio, not the 9:16 you’d get by rotating a monitors, which is too narrow for my taste.