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In Defense of Portrait Mode
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Tue May 11th 2010
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by
Brett
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For years I wondered about the utility of running monitors in portrait mode. I tried it a couple of times an while reading websites was fantastic in this orientation there were many other applications that just didn't work well. Thanks to Visual Studio 2010 and multiple monitors I think I now have reached a state of nirvana.
One of the nice new features of VS 2010 is that it supports tearing off toolbars and code windows and positioning them outside of visual studio. In the screens above you can see that I have taken the tools window and moved it off to the left monitor - giving me enough width to see a full line of code. Without a second monitor things are just too narrow for this to be effective (unless you are a fan of the auto-hide features which I am not). Being able to see a huge vertical column of code definately reduces the aggravation of having to constantly scroll. I also like how much vertical room it leaves for the solution explorer, which leads to less expanding/collapsing of the tree to get to your files.
The leftmost monitor of course operates in landscape mode which in my mind is necessary to support apps that don't work well in portrait mode. Terminal services is a great example of this. I am constantly TS-ing into other boxes to perform updates/code pushes/etc and 1080 pixes of width on the portrait monitor just doesn't cut it.
Since I have adopted this setup I normally keep VS running on the right monitor maximized. The left monitor holds a half screen outlook and a half screen browser for reference purposes. When I am doing serious reading I use the Windows 7 window snapping shortcuts (Windows-Left/Right/Up) to move the browser to the portrait montior for some serious content absorption.
Of course this has me seriously considering a third landscape monitor for the right side....
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