My workstation layout

Our team just moved to a new building in Microsoft India campus. A lot of people were going around checking out other people's office. I got asked couple of times about my workstation layout and thought I'll do a quick post on that.

Like most people in our team I use a dual monitor setup. Last time I estimated I spend about 12% of my life looking for things (40% of it for my car keys). So even though there are people who use 7 monitors I'm never going to join that gang and bump that number to 30% by adding the time to search for my app window. And Microsoft will definitely not fund those many monitors either :). So for me 2 is enough.

Both monitors I have, are standard HP1965 (19" monitors) hooked on to ATI Radeon cards. One of the monitors (the one on the left) is looped through a KVM switch and I can rotate that among the other 2 machines that I have. The other I have rotated in portrait (vertical) mode and use it primarily for coding. The image below should explain why

This provides a much better code view. In the font size I use (Consolas 9pt) I can see 74 lines of code vs 54 in the landscape mode. So this means 37% more!!! Since I have ATI card I use Catalyst Control Center to rotate the display.

I also prefer dark background and use white/light-color text on it. My eyes feel better with it. I keep both Visual Studio and GVim in dark color mode. You can download my vssettings from here and .vimrc from here.

That kind of rounds up the workstation layout that I use in office. I try my best not to work on the laptop directly.  I TS on to it in case I need to use it for any reason. When I took the picture it was quietly napping on the other side of my office :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2008
  Hi, This settings file is not working with visual studio 2005. I guess it is of 2008 I read you blog and found nice and interesting.

• Anonymous
  May 30, 2008
  54 -> 74... nice, but won't this just encourage you to write longer more complicated methods? ;)

• Anonymous
  May 30, 2008
  yea right, as if I need excuse to do that :)