I'm mainly curious about software developers here, or anyone else whose computer is somewhat central to their life, be it professional or hobbyist.
I only have two monitors—one directly in front of me, and another to the right of it, angled toward me. For web development, I keep my editor on the main screen, and anything auxiliary (be that a dev build, a video, StackOverflow, etc.) on the side screen.
I wouldn't mind a third monitor, and if I had one, I'd definitely use it for log/output, since currently it's a floating window that I shuffle around however necessary. It could be smaller than the other two, and I might even turn it vertical so I could split the screen between output and a terminal, configuring a AutoHotKey script to focus the terminal.
What about y'all?
[ cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13864053 ]
The old data I have from the industrial engineering work was that going from one to two monitors was a 40% productivity speed up, then from two to three was about a 5% speedup, then three to four was a productivity loss.
Those numbers were on general workloads, not for specialists. It was also with UI design from 20 years ago, and the way interfaces work now the numbers are likely different.
Personally, I immediately try to get a second monitor because having only one means I lose a lot of focus and mental time just swapping the active on screen windows, but a rarely seek out a third, though a third is nice for overflow tools (chat, docs, music) to have a third screen.