Making the best use of a big monitor.

[Girard442]

Last edited Sun Mar 29, 2020, 04:52 PM - Edit history (1)

At home I have two monitors on my desktop system and it's a dream. Run one app in one screen and another in the other. 1001 uses. At work, I have a nice big monitor. I run one application almost continuously and a motley crew of others off and on. I've taken a few stabs at trying to divvy up my screen real estate on my big work monitor to approximate the the two monitors I have at home, but the endless adjusting and resizing made me want to chuck a brick through the screen. Anyone else have a setup like this that they made work smoothly?

On Edit: I should have said I was using Windows 10. Forgot.

[CloudWatcher]

1. What OS?

There are "screen organizer" apps for Windows and macOS. Some free, none expensive. I just looked at the Apple store and stopped after reading about a dozen of them.

[Girard442]

3. TY. Win 10. Fixed the OP. I'll look into them. I'd have to get the go-ahead from IT and...

...right now, I'm basically a rented mule, so it might be slow going.

[HuskyOffset]

2. Most OSes have support for multiple virtual desktops

I know on macOS they're called "spaces" and you access them through "Mission Control". You can create up to 16 "spaces" and have different apps running in different spaces and switch among them. Something similar is available in linux and I'm pretty sure Windows as well.

If you want to keep multiple apps open on your monitor at the same time arranged in a side-by-side configuration, Windows has some sort of automatic way to do this. I think macOS does as well, but I've never used it. If this is what you're interested in, hopefully someone else here knows how to do that, if not I'll be happy to do some more digging (if you're on macOS.)

[Girard442]

4. TY. It's Win 10. Fixed the OP. I use Oracle VirtualBox at home, basically to run...

...old SW that I found in fossilized amber (OK, maybe not that old) but our IT department would faint dead away if I brought that up.

[HuskyOffset]

5. It's not a VM

The virtual desktops feature isn't a virtual machine, it just let's you pretend you have multiple monitors hooked up to your computer, but only shows one at a time on your actual monitor. It's a way of running programs in their own desktop and you switch among the desktops. It doesn't help if you need to have both programs open on the same desktop, but it is a way to organize & group programs that you use together. For example, say you're a web designer, you could put your HTML editor and web browser in desktop #1, put your e-mail program, Twitter, and Facebook apps on desktop #2, etc. That way you don't have tons of windows from all those programs all on one desktop piled on top of each other.

I don't use virtual desktops myself, since I do most of my work on macOS & just use its ability to hide an application & all its windows, I just hide any apps I'm not using at the moment. Works for me, since I don't switch apps very frequently.

Nothing beats multiple actual monitors though.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

6. In the past, when I did more work from home...

...I had a somewhat high powered (not gaming) desktop with 2 monitors. Next to it I keep my work issued laptop on top of 2 older desktops one of which ran Linux (maybe Mint or BusyBox). I used remote desktop/VNC to access the 2 older PCs and ran Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy) to share the KB and mouse across the main computer and work issued laptop.


Today I'm only able to work from home with everything ITAR restricted partitioned out of what I access on the VPN from home and everything on the IT issued hardware is locked down. I can't even play music from a thumb drive.


Good luck with IT.

[Girard442]

7. Remote access S/W is cool.

My desktop used to connect via a wireless dongle to the router and I'd connect my laptop to the router wirelessly also. The VNC connection worked pretty well, and then I hardwired the desktop to the router (chasing an unrelated problem). VNC really took off. Seems like reducing the number of wireless hops to one really sped things up.

[OAITW r.2.0]

8. You might find Stardock Fences an excellent utility to manage your desktop screen.

I finally bought it for $10.00. It has a new "roll up feature that allows you to have different fences of files/apps that are hidden until you mouse over. It's pretty slick.

Another app that I find handy is File Maker Pro. It has different color folfers and sysmbols, numbber. letters to differential your files, visually.