I often see people talking about the need for three or more monitors because they assume more monitors => more efficient work, but this is bullshit. Let me elaborate.
The real time consumer in programming work is of course the thought necessary to solve the problem at hand, but we’ll leave that out for now and instead focus on actual, hard workflow.
Browsing through documentation and datasheets is one example which, depending on the kind of programming you do, might take up a large amount of time. Having to constantly switch between the text editor and a document viewer is no fun and takes a considerable amount of work which is why people almost always use two monitors. The first one holds mostly active windows you interact with frequently like your text editor or a real-time chat program. The second monitor holds passive windows like the document viewer or a web browser with important information. So far, so good. If you have lots of active or lots of passive windows though, things start to get complicated. You might often need to switch focus between your text editor and chat program on your first and your document viewer and web browser on your second monitor. On traditional systems, this becomes a nuisance quickly as you start to spend half of your time dragging windows around.
Most people are eternally stuck in this state. Their right hand cycles between keyboard and mouse duty a dozen times a minute. They think the solution is more monitors because then they can view more windows at once meaning there is less need to switch around. This creates another problem.
I have tried working with three and even four monitors before - stacked on top, vertical side-by-side and so on. None of these solutions was satisfying. The problem here is that when using two monitors only, one can turn the body to face the middle so then only minimal head movement is necessary to give full attention to a single monitor at one time. This doesn’t work with three monitors however as the constant switching from left to right puts a lot of strain on your neck. So, if more monitors don’t work the wonders we make them out to do, what can we do to fix the problem?
The solution is simple: start using your system, especially your window manager, more effectively. This is explicitly aimed at non-Linux users as they are the most probable to not know what their OS can really do. Two things you might want to look into are virtual desktops and window snapping shortcuts. Virtual desktops or workspaces are used to group windows and allow you to switch between the different groups, even across monitors. A few groups I like to have:
, but these can of course be completely customized. Window snapping is simple too and refers to shortcuts with which you can put a window on the left half or right half of your monitor. Or the top half. Or the bottom left half. Whatever you want.
That’s basically it. Use your environment more efficiently instead of spending money on things you don’t need (oddly enough, you see this everywhere - trying to compensate for missing efficiency by bluntly increasing something else; please try to avoid this). If you want to learn more about how window managers on *nix systems work, check out this introduction to the dwm window manager(TODO). And if you really want to spend lots of money on your setup, make sure to buy two large, high-quality monitors or a single ultrawide one. After all, it’s the size that matters.