Is anyone happy coding on such a small screen, even if it is high-res?
I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely.
My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display, which I also find too small. I'm thinking a 15", high-res display would probably be ideal for portable coding?
The weight issue I certainly agree with - my G3 is big and heavy, whereas my MBP is small and light. I also mostly dock my laptop, but I still spend a lot of time undocked (probably 15-20 hours a week).
I also use external monitors during the day (27" QHD in landscape as the main one, 24" FHD in portrait as secondary), but when travelling, and in the evenings where I try to be more sociable that shutting myself away, I find the lack of screen real estate a real PITA.
I do 99+% of my programming on my MacBook Pro's 13" screen. It's certainly possible to do, and I generally seem to prefer it to connecting to an external display.
I moved to a 10.1" display as a winter (low power) necessity. There's more sun now so I have enough power for my larger laptop but am not using it, I prefer the ergonomics of my current setup.
My tablet is on an arm suspended at eye height about 15-20cm away from my face. At the same time I can have my ThinkPad BlueTooth keyboard+trackpoint in an ergonomically sound position (not possible to do both of these things solely with a laptop due to the keyboard and display being tied together).
I had a 15.6" laptop display and a ruler within reach so I just measured... at 35-40cm away from my face the visible area of the 15.6" screen is occluded by the visible area of the tablet screen at 15-20 cm away. The aspect ratios are different (my preferred 16:10/1920x1200 on the tablet vs 16:9/1920x1080 on the laptop lcd) but this is roughly correct. Admittedly 35-40cm is probably a little further away than most people have their laptop screen but it's in the ballpark.
I've had setups with multiple/larger monitors in the past. It's hard to compare properly as so much has changed for me. I move towards spending more and more of my time in the terminal and have learned to make good use of tmux for workspace management (and i3 workspaces when I'm using a WM). I don't miss the multiple/larger monitors (but am not suggesting anybody should be the same as me).
I can say that this is my favourite of my personally-owned setups ever, for its lightness, silence, low power usage and minimal space requirements. These requirements of mine are very specific of course but you asked for a subjective measure. I am very happy (and on a 10.1" screen)!
Next time I upgrade I'll be looking for a nice rootable tablet... possibly something x86 which can run linux so I can get VMs to work. I think I'm done with laptops.
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To repeat stuff I've mentioned here before but which might help make sense of the above:
+ the 'display' is an Android tablet running termux (as it's the fastest and nicest terminal I could find)
+ I just use termux for its terminal and work in Debian Stretch via Linux Deploy
+ Termux is very good on its own but in my experience the best armhf packages are on Debian. I'm comparing to termux and Arch which are all I have experience with - they are both great but I've found some packages to be either missing or had problems due to termux's clang vs gcc... or that Arch uses Armv7 binaries whereas my tablet seems happier with Debian's Armhf in some cases. I specifically had trouble getting a working binary for Chromium which is essential for me as I need the developer tools but achieved it on Debian.
+ I run Debian GUI apps via local XSDL server and/or VNC
+ So far the only thing I've been unable to achieve is VMWare emulation of X86 OSes but as I don't have an X86 CPU in here I can't be surprised about that
]
So many things about this comment raise so many questions.
1. "winter (low power) necessity" Do you live in some remote cabin where you exist solely off of solar power or something? Sounds fascinating.
2. "I don't have an x86 CPU in here" Do you do all of your development solely off of a Android tablet running Debian in some kind of bizarre franken-ARM-Linux setup?
I have a 2016 13" MBP, and find the screen too small for coding. It's high-res, but that means everything is super-small unless you increase the scaling, which of course reduces the available screen real estate. The screen is annoyingly reflective too, but that's another problem entirely.
My daily driver is a 15" HP Zbook G3 with a 1080p display, which I also find too small. I'm thinking a 15", high-res display would probably be ideal for portable coding?