Earlier this week we asked you to share your multi-monitor workspace tips and tricks. Now we’re back with a roundup of helpful reader comments and awesome photos.
Photo by A.D. Wheeler (Flickr/HTG Comment).
Your comments covered everything from software and hardware choices, to physical arrangements, to extra tips on tweaking monitors and squeezing out extra functionality from peripheral devices like unused iPads. Read on as we take a look at what you use and how you use it.
Tying Your Hardware Together with Software
Across setups, number of monitors, and hardware arrangements, the most common element among reader responses was the use of software to enhance their multi-monitor experience. What was the most cited reason for using software? Unifying the taskbar across all the monitors. To this end the readers used both Ultramon and Display Fusion. Between the two Ultramon is more popular but the small lead in popularity can be attributed to Display Fusion’s late adoption of the multi-monitor taskbar (many people associate Display Fusion with multi-monitor wallpaper and screensavers, not realizing they’ve supported a robust taskbar system for quite some time). Other people use both because they like features offered by each application. Cate’s comment highlights this trend:
Big Ferret is a huge fan of Ultramon and gives us a quick over view of its features:
A. D. Wheeler, whose HDR photo is the lead image for this article, shares his love of Display Fusion as a wallpaper and taskbar management system as well as highlights another popular app we heard a lot about: Synergy.
I couldn’t live without Ultramon.
Synergy is a fantastic application that allows you to control multiple physical PCs via a single set of inputs. You can read more about it on the Synergy web site, but for the unfamiliar you install a small server app on your primary machine and then install client apps on all the auxiliary machines. The server app sends all your keyboard and mouse commands to the other machines when you’re actively using them, tricking all of them into thinking the keyboard and mouse are actually hooked up. If you work with multiple physical machines it’s a huge time saver.
Although not as popular as Synergy, Input Director is a viable alternative—and one used by several readers. You can read more about configuring it here. DeepcoverNZ logs a vote for Input Director:
Not many people made mention of tiling or snap-to applications, but those who made use of them certainly got their money’s worth out of it. Guilherma de Sousa shared a screenshot of the Linux tiling app Awesome:
Awesome is a tiling window manager, so I use 100% of my screen space, and have it configured to open specific apps in specific virtual desktops and monitor.
Switching between monitors is a two keyboard keys press process, which makes it very fast (a lot faster then alt+tabbing all windows until you find the one you want).
Hardware Tweaks and Tricks
Several of you mentioned rotating monitors in order to take advantage of increased vertical space for document editing and coding.
Photo by Jack Swanborough.
If you have the space, the monitors, and your hardware/software supports it, rotating your monitors can be very useful. Bryan writes:
Steven Shaffer mixed monitors together, keeping his central monitor landscape while rotating the two side monitors to portrait mode. Check out the photo of his setup and his comments on it:
Wayne puts his iPad to good use as a tertiary monitor:
Extending the PC’s screen space to the iPad instead of relying on the iPad itself is a really clever way to put the screen to good use without being curtailed by the limitations of software available for iOS.
While the majority of readers stuck to using software to control their multiple monitor/multiple PC configurations, a few—mostly those working in IT/computer repair—used hardware switches. StarsLikeDust writes:
The combination of Synergy and a physical KVM switch is a good compromise between speed and ease of use and the necessity of adding in a physical machine when necessary.
For more tips, tricks, and a peek at how your fellow readers have their systems configured, hit up the comments on the original Ask the Readers post here. Have additional multi-monitor tips to share? Sound off in the comments.
