On Having a Multi-Monitor Setup

I take most of my meetings from my home office, and as a result, about once a month I reference having six monitors on my home setup. Now, while having six or more monitors isn’t exactly rare nowadays—there are dedicated rigs and brackets and braces specifically for setting up six or more—I find most people I talk to haven’t personally met someone with six.

So, they ask to see my setup. My webcam’s cord isn’t long enough to just pick it up and pan it around my office. So, instead, I have to do one of four things:

Spend 5 minutes of our meeting scouring my Twitter history to find that one time I posted a picture of it.
Spend 5 minutes scouring the pictures archives on my computer to find a picture I’ve already taken of it.
Awkwardly take a picture of it to send right then.
Promise to send one later, then forget.

So, I’m writing this post to add option #5, which hopefully I’ll remember as the best option going forward:

Link them to this blog post.

So, if you’re here because I sent you a link to this post, hi! Sorry it’s taken this far into the post to get to the picture. Giant rubber duck for scale:

On a typical day, it looks something like this:

I tend to keep the tall vertical one on the left for email, while the far right one is split between Microsoft Teams on top and Slack on the bottom. Across the bottom are three Raspberry Pi monitors—two 7″, one 10″—but I just have them hooked into a standard DisplayPort for extended monitor space. The small one on the left usually has my to-do list and notes; the small one on the right is usually Messenger for chatting with family; and the middle one lately has just had ChatGPT open all the time. If I have a script running syncing grades or something it’s usually on one of those bottom ones.

The big curved monitor in the middle is a Samsung CJ890, and it alone cost as much as the entire rest of the computer—at the time that seemed silly, but it’s definitely been worth it. Microsoft PowerToys is a lifesaver with managing screen real estate, though.

But while this set-up is nice, I have to admit I’m still more proud of my six-monitor set-up that I originally created 11 years ago, back before this was nearly as common:

The two square ones on the ends came from yard sales. The two vertical ones on my current set-up are the same as the two vertical from 11 years ago, but what you can’t see is the upper middle monitor there held up by three drinking glasses and a pair of toy blocks: