I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen.
At my last startup, we all worked from our laptops with no external monitors. I got used to it after a few weeks, and found myself able to work fine like that for 2 years.
When I switched jobs and finally had access to a huge apple cinema display, it felt way too big. What do I need all this space for? Of course, I got used to that after a couple weeks, and now I have a hard time coding when I'm away from it.
I've noticed the same thing when I travel with only my tiny chromebook (with crouton): the first week it seems painfully small, then it's normal. And when I go back to my 15" mbp, it seems unnecessarily large.
YMMV, but my experience has been that whatever I use for a week or two is fine for me.
Another part of it is what your software is designed for. I honestly think xcode 5 was designed for 27" 1440p displays. I was always frustrated with xcode on a 1080p display until I moved to a 1440p display with it.
Good point. I do almost all of my work in vim or a terminal, which maximize my text-editing space. I could see feeling cramped in an IDE with lots of side displays and menus.
Truly - moving off my triple headed desktop to my X1 carbon is always jarring, especially with merging.
A few things that have helped me working with constrained real estate:
1) Terminal font choice - I switched to Inconsolata last year for my road laptop. Can drop font size to 10 and save serious column space without murdering your eyes.
2) High contrast syntax highlighting with light and dark themes - While I love Solarized on my desktop, glare can make it tough to read. I often switch to Tomorrow (http://chriskempson.github.io/base16/#tomorrow) dark or light depending on the conditions.
3) Buffer navigation plugins - The biggest productivity sink of the small, horizontal laptop screen is the reduced real estate for code. You end up spending way more time navigating up and down a file than on a bigger screen. As I use vim, I use EasyMotion (https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) to make that navigation fast. Repeating the last motion in particular is super useful.
You probably won't like this suggestion, but I think the effect you're experiencing is a mirage. I've spent a lot of time on 3-monitor setups and a lot of time on just a laptop screen and I think the number of screens ranked somewhere around #43 on a "List of things affecting my productivity."
As Adam Carolla jokes, if you use chapstick every day, then suddenly you notice that you can't live without chapstick. But, if you never use it, then you don't need it. A lot of things are like this, including, I think, multiple monitors. Go without them for a while and you'll find that they're really not necessary.
I currently do 100% of my work on a 17" laptop (and right now I'm hanging out in a small town in the Sierra, watching a river flow by right outside my window).
I'm not sure what you use, but I've found that just keeping a really organized workspace helps a lot. I use KDE4 and have four workspaces set up: one for web browser, one for tiled ssh terminals, one for Sublime, and one for "everything else". They're always arranged in the same order, and I have an easy hotkey (ctrl-alt-left or right arrow) to switch between them
Open question: what's the best "workspaces" solution for Windows 8? I've seen many and used a few, but each had certain drawbacks. Does anyone have a favorite?
My solution has been to use much smaller fonts. That's the only way to fit the same amount of information on a smaller screen. My favorite font is ProggyTiny: http://geoff.greer.fm/2013/12/24/programming-fonts/
If you have the space, moving any reference querying over to a tablet (iPad, etc) is one trick I use. Actually, the biggest use for my iPad is as a reference book.
I know that your question is more about productivity/managing with less space, but at the very least, to make your life easier I recommend Stay for OS X.
If you go from a dual monitor setup to solo and back a lot, Stay will manage your windows and keep them in the same position (and crucially, the same size) when you plug your monitor back in.
Of course it would add to the energy consumption (and probably the energy used by the laptop), but the advantage is it's light, and in a travel-convenient form factor.
I use my ipad as a second monitor occasionally, using air display. It works well to throw a browser up on and test. Or, even if you don't use air display, as long as you're okay with the mobile browser for the testing, you can set up a local network, and just navigate to the test address.
It's not ideal, but it's nice.
I find the size of my multiple monitor setup is less a concern than being able to mentally divide tasks/contexts. ymmv
Having a virtual desktop manager helps a lot, along with keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops comfortably. For Linux/Mac virtual desktops are built in and for Windows there's VirtaWin.
I've always dug the idea of eventually having a high-res, oculus or something like it, with multiple virtual displays, (or more interestingly a paradigm for arranging and working with programs specifically designed for 3D).
I also like the idea of something like that, but with an AR approach. Map an AR virtual monitor to any flat surface or random space you want.
I'm sure there are way better things you can do with AR than just that (I just think it's a reasonable and useful naive first approach), so here's hoping someday soon :)
CastAR sounds like it might make a cool dev environment. Hang up the reflective material, put on the glasses, and you've got a screen. Doesn't block everything else out the way the Oculus does.
http://technicalillusions.com/castar/
in my fantasy world I have a computer (a laptop or maybe just a processing unit of some sort) plus something like an oculus with many cameras on it .
When I am busy, I shut off the world and get distraction-free. When I want to interact with others I composite the real world atop my VR world from the cameras, without ever lifting the headset.
Any suggestions for this?