Extravagant, that is what I used to think of people who insisted on having a second monitor. Why would you need two screen you can only look at one thing at a time. At least that's what I thought until I got the bright idea to hook up my laptop to my desktops monitor. Now I think that it is a Luxury worth having.

Yes, it is true that you can only look at one thing at a time, but moving from one thing to another requires way more effort when it displaces what you were working on. Being able to read one screen of text while typing n another is wonderful.

My setup has the code I'm working on and a console window on my main screen right in front of me. In the other screen there is my test code, a browser with the rubygems rdoc server up, and another browser with my app loaded in it.

When I'm web browsing, I have the second screen showing my bookmarks, my mail, or my server log on autoscroll. When I'm blogging, I will put my references in my second screen. As I look back now I think this would have been a great setup for writing papers in school. PDFs ans scans in one window, text in the other.

So now when I see someone with two great big monitors splayed out across there desk, I still think they have too much money, but I at least know that they spend it well.