Hi!
Often times I get approached by colleagues asking why and how do I use just one display, or why is everything so small on my screen.
Ive come to use this setup by trial an error, but Ive happily used it for a couple of years both on 15 inch and 13 inch devices and its been quite productive.
Having too many screens is more distracting than useful for me in particular, therefore Im sticking to the very useful virtual desktop feature of the mac OS. It’s been added lately to windows as well, so even if I change the OS the setup doesn’t change substantially.
To effectively switch screens, even when I use an external screen and a mouse, Ive decided to remap the caps lock to the ctrl key, and add shortcuts for each virtual desktop, so that I can jump several screens at once.
Each desktop is a group of apps sorted by a certain category. Therefore, jumping between them is a crucial part the work process.
To have multiple apps on a single screen, I use “Magnet”, a window management app which lets you put the applications wherever you need them by just pressing a couple of keys.
An open source alternative is called “Spectacles”, and as far as I know, it achieves the same thing.
By just pressing a couple of buttons I can resize and realign the windows to where I want them to be, without much of a problem.
To fit all these windows in just one screen, a laptop display might not be enough. Fortunately, all the recent MacBooks use excellent and high res screens, which use the retina technology. For my particular use case, I enjoy have extra space on my screen so I can fit anything I would like. Macs have scaled resolutions, so it’s possible to adjust the UI size for a user’s taste, but the options don’t go far enough since those are only within the retina range.
To map the resolutions 1 to 1 to the screen’s resolution, which in case of the 13 inch MacBook is 2560 by 1600, and for the 15 inch 2880 to 1880, a third party software needs to be used. That could be done manually by some console commands, but if you’d like a nice interface, there is the “EasyRes” app which helps re-adjusting to the desired resolution.
After all these tricks, my usual workspace looks like this, where I fit either 3 or 4 windows into splits, and I move between the windows by just pressing the keyboard shortcuts, which are capslock + 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5.
The screenshot has been taken on a 13 inch Macbook Pro. The UI is kinda small, but I got used to it. I am sure that the gained productivity and comfiness outweighs the need to sit a bit closer to the laptop. On the actual device it looks like the following.
Hopefully these tips were useful for your particular setup, and if there are any other tips you could share that I’ve missed, let me know!
