A monitor large enough to loose things on (Or why to buy a 39" 4k monitor)

When coding or trying to manage a project with multiple dimensions, systems, terminal prompts, web portals, design programs, etc, it has always been a challenge to keep everything organized at any given time because all the programs are layered on each other, resulting in everyone tabbing 5 to 50 times to finish any task.

I have always had the goal of having a monitor large enough that I can fit everything I need on to it without crowding. The Macbook Retina was a good improvement over standard laptops, but only allowed 2-3 applications to be visible at any given time, so it still required a lot of tabbing.

I have finally found a monitor close to achieving this goal for a reasonable price. The Seiko 39" 4k monitor (3840 x 2160) was on super-sale for $450 from Amazon and I snapped one up.

Improvement in visibility

When doing a physical comparison between application sizes on the Macbook Retina 15" and the Seiko, applications appear at roughly the same real-world size on both, which means that it has over 6x the area of the Macbook Retina. I can now realistically fit all of this on the same display:

Sublime, Omnifocus, Chrome, 2 consoles, Evernote, Jenkins and mail with room to spare on the 39" 4k monitor.

Compared to the Macbook Retina with all the same programs running:

Chrome and a smaller version of Sublime fill the entire Macbook Retina monitor.

The number of pixels is actually almost identical between the two displays, but the difference is that on the Macbook, the size of the screen is 15", so the actual size people can resolve (And that OS X supports) is much smaller. The 4k monitor still has an amazing resolution so you can't see any of the pixels for it either during standard usage.

Everything is easier to see

After playing with the monitor for a while, the result is that on the 39" 4k monitor, the number of visible applications is 6 or more. This really changes the feel of interacting with the computer and makes it much faster to see and understand everything at once without tabbing.