As it tends to be with many things in life, I just didn’t see the need for multiple monitors until I had the experience myself. Up until my time at the game dev studio in the U.K. (which will remain anonymous :)), I had no idea what it was like to work on a machine that had more than one monitor. Within a week, there was no going back!

Those of you who use at least two monitors for day to day work will know what I’m going to say in this post - those of you who don’t (and in particular, never have done) should listen and listen good! Because the joy and productivity increases are just awesome.

Here’s a shot of my current desktop - including the newly purchased Samsung 204B LCD monitor which is this years Christmas present to me from Amy, aren’t I lucky!

One of the good things about this is that it’s forced me to clean my desk up, but that’s only a small win compared to the others

So what is it about having more than one monitor that makes working a joy? The first thing for me is screen real-estate. Now some of you guys who have one extremely large monitor as opposed to two smaller ones will be saying “we get that too”, and yes you do, the stuff that you don’t get I’ll be talking about in a minute When you’re developing any form of application being able to see lots of information on screen at once makes your life a lot easier, particularly when you’re debugging code. The amount of information you need and have available vary depending on the language that you use, but for my example I’m going to use my language of preference, C++, writing my software of preference, games.

If you’re debugging games, you may (or may not) want to have the following information available:

• Call Stack
• Watch Window(s)
• Memory Windows
• Registers
• Source Code
• Machine Code (ASM)
• Solution Explorers
• Breakpoint Listings
• …etc

You get the point. There’s a LOT of information you can have on screen at any given time, and being able to see what you need at any given time is great. Try fitting even half of that stuff onto a single monitor! It’s a tough job. If you have a massive monitor, then it’s a bit easier, and easier again if it’s widescreen.

So, that just caters for your dev environment. What about the software itself!? You need to see that running while you’re debugging - if you’re writing PC games, you don’t want to have to debug in windowed mode as it’s not really a great reflection of how things will run when you’re running fullscreen - so you should really debug fullscreen. With a single monitor, not possible. With dual, totally possible.

Bear in mind that most other people have lots of other stuff running too - all fighting to get a piece of that hard-core on screen action:

• Email
• Web Browser(s)
• Instant Messenger(s)
• File Explorers
• Terminal Windows
• …etc

Another thing that I consider to be tres bon is the ability to have what appears to be multiple OSes running at the same time but on different monitors. I am, of course, talking about sticking an install of *choose your operating system* running inside a Virtual Machine. Fire up your virtual machine, drag it onto the other monitor and maximise - viola! You have two computers running at once (effectively ;)) and they each have their own totally viewable desktop (without the pain of having to switch). It’s a joy to behold!

Once you’ve experienced multi-monitor dev, you’ll never want to go back to a single monitor. To me it’s like going back to dial-up when you’ve had broadband - it’s just not possible!

What do you guys think?