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The nice thing about this is that the glasses can be focused at a more-normal distance, which means I was able to push my monitor back on my desk instead of keeping it at about 8-10". It's now at about 20", give or take. (I did have to change some font settings and some apps, like Outlook, don't respect all the settings, but that's managable. And I'm used to the software world not fully supporting the visually-impaired.) That, in turn, meant that I could finally support a second monitor -- commonly available in my company, but I could never get that much screen in visual range before. But now...
My second 22" monitor arrived yesterday. My plan had been to set it up in portrait mode (which would allow me to have more than 45 lines of text visible in an emacs buffer), but my graphics card's default driver doesn't support that. There is a newer driver, but it has other issues.
But, my computer is coming up on the end of its lease, which means I'm going to have to move off of it in a few months anyway. So, worst case I wait a few months to be able to rotate my monitor, or best case maybe I'll be allowed to switch early. Moving to a new computer is a pain in the butt, especially with all the security exemptions and stuff (to install non-standard software), so I never would have expected to find myself saying "I hope I can replace my computer soon". :-) (Holy cow, I just realized this will be computer #5 for me... maybe I can safely delete the archives from #2.)
I wonder if I can get a trackball or similar pointing device, too. Not to replace the mouse -- to augment it. This is a lot of screen to move across, and I'd like to spare my mouse hand the broad traversals. (I've never been any good at fine control with a trackball or touchpad, but if I could have both that and the mouse... I assume I can plug in two USB pointing devices and they'd both work, and that trackballs etc come USB these days. Something to check.)
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There seems to be something of a vicious cycle with monitors and apps: monitors are landscape, so apps are sometimes optimized for that, which pushes you to stay in landscape. And it all pushes users to take advantage of it too; the max-line-length-in-code argument at work was somewhat passionate, with proponents arguing that IntelliJ has all this room available so why not use it? At the time a 120-character line in IntelliJ (with the other useful stuff like the class hierarchies over on the side) would not fit on my monitor in a font size I could read. That's no longer true, but even so, I find really long lines really really hard to read. And then there's the web, with lots of sites hard-wiring their content to wider than I want a browser window -- if I make the window that wide for your graphics, my text-based browsing now has the same line-length problem. I want to read text and code in a portrait style, and the wide-screen monitors actually take away a little height (the aspect ratio of my 22" work monitors is different than that of my home 19" monitor). So, all that said, being able to turn one monitor to portrait, so I can put my editors and browsers there while letting Outlook, IntelliJ, our own software, and other wide apps have the other, is perfect. As soon as I get a configuration that supports it.
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I run in 1024x768 (or whatever the equivalent vertical is) for exactly the reason of font size. Most people seem horrified, but I find the "large fonts" setting breaks so many things that a lower resolution is the best way to deal with eyesight issues. But yes, that causes problems in a lot of applications. Eclipse with all its toolbars and docked areas leaves me with about sixty characters across in viewable area, unless I am constantly swapping between a full screen editor and a useable IDE. Outlook I just suffer through.