Are Vertical Monitors Worth it for Programmers?

There has been a lot of progress made in computer monitor design lately. They have grown bigger, and at the same time, wider. That’s great for video editors, desktop publishers and animators. For web programmers and app developers, though, not so much.

Take a web page for instance. Viewing it on a widescreen (landscape) monitor may allow you to super-size it, but at some point you’ll have to spin the old scroll wheel to see the rest of the story. Web pages are meant to be moved up and down. A wide monitor may let you view multiple pages side by side, but you will still have to scroll.

Web pages are meant to be viewed in an upright, vertical (portrait) position. They are the digital equivalent of a newspaper. How are newspapers presented? Portrait. Sure, you can open it wide and put two pages in your field of view, but you still have to look up and down to see all the content.

There are many benefits in working with a vertical monitor, and they all boil down to one thing – more space. Turning their view 90 degrees developers can see more lines of their program. Veteran programmer crunchers will say their 27" FHD monitors can display as many (or more than) 55 lines of program. The landscape view shows them somewhere around 27. That’s a doubled increase, just by flipping their monitor on its ear.

Some people opt to use two landscape monitors side-by-side. While an option, this setup doesn’t really show them as much as they think it will. A great alternative to the dual monitor setup is to have one portrait next to a landscape one, or one landscape monitor between two portrait ones.

Portrait monitors allow you to see more on screen; they also save more space on your desk, but some drawbacks exist. Somebody finds a flipped monitor too tall. Unlike landscape, which requires a broader field of view, portrait requires a narrower gaze. Finding a "sweet spot" in the center of a portrait monitor is harder. It may cause pain in the neck and shoulder if a monitor is too tall. Hence, we recommend a smaller screen size, such as 24-inch, to be the portrait monitor, pairing with a 27-inch monitor as a horizontal one.