Remember Hasselblad?

That new screen of mine's as good as it gets, and there's no real alternative in sight. While with astigmatism (or whatever it is), you aren't well-advised to either put two text applications onto your screen, each of them taking exactly its half (simily-symmetry, "lines" to be continued over the whole width - the effect is less when you do it 2/3 / 1/3 for example), and/or to try to read texts from a central, symmetric viewing position - the screen right in front of you, you always can playe your screen(s) as I did with my original ones (2x 17" with 1280x1024 each):

One of my original 17" is placed as it had been, at about 30 degrees angled, while my new screen is "behind" the left one, equally angled about 30 degrees inwards, and for my respective application, I use about the "first", inner 2/3 of its width, or even a little bit less, around 36 cm of 59.5 cm, and frankly, I don't know too well yet what I'll do with the rest, far out to the right.

Within those abount 36 cm, my visual angle remains within the 90-100 degrees range, as with my 17" screen (34 cm in all for the screen without border) - remember, both screens are angled towards me -, and clearly (and subjectively only), the left corners of the screen flee to the back, as well as the right ones do (and any texts with them: trees like the FF bookmarks for example), but this isn't disturbing anymore since the pane (the surface of the LCD screen itself) flees with it and in the same direction, just not as sharply (parallax): The screen itself is turned into the same direction as the textlines just seem to vanish, so that's ok, doesn't irritate. (It's only when I think of it and look out for it that it becomes clearly "visible".)

Not so for the third of the screen to the right: Here, as before, the text lines flee from me, while the screen approaches me, and the receding of the lines from left to right doesn't remain imperceptible at all. So for the time being, I put some tools over there, I use it as a scrap area, for nothing important, and at the end of the day, I really could do without it: Over there, it's all of no real use.

On the other hand, for some applications, that space is almost invaluable, speaking of videos (remember that then the viewing distance is 1 m or 1m20, so the viewing angle will be diminished again), spreadsheets (I don't use Excel often, but when I do, it's incredibly better now than with trying to read some spreadsheet spread over two or more screens), and of course anything "graphics", be it vector graphics, business graphics, flowcharts, mindmaps, google maps, piping, whatever): As with spreadsheets, it's not that text near the outer edge now became really "readable" suddenly (in the sense of "not disturbing while being read"), but it's about "holding all the relevant things together (incl. palettes, too), even if then you must move your chest quite a lot in order to reduce the viewing angle again.

My current setup is rather ugly since my main screen, the left one, now looks pretty lame in comparison - and mouse movement from my right screen (1440 pix) to the left one (1024 pix) isn't easy either: either, it isn't smooth nearing the top of the screen, or to the bottom, or, but lesser, on both ends.

Also, the screens are 15 or more years apart, and that shows, and to now have more pixels on my main screen, too, wouldn't be a bad idea after all, while there is no other screen format offering the same height (1440 pix) though.

When I said "behind", it's understood that all screens are tilted, so it's only the bottom edges where you can't see the right one, positioned behind the left one: All the luminous surface and even most of the right edge is clearly visible because of that tilting-plus-angle-positioning, and that triangle which opens more and more from bottom to top could be diverting for some: you can peek thru it. I don't see anything behind anymore - I do just now, writing about it -, but in case, you could place something evenly-surfaced there.

So it's about not having a large central screen since then anything near the edges would get too bad a viewing angle / would be too far away, and that also applies to additional screens over there. So what about a tinier central screen? That would be possible of course, and probably, for not-graphics' work, not-viewing-films-too, 3 screens of 1600x1200 each would be ideal...

But then, why not 3 times 1600x1600, while we are at it? In fact, I love the additional 420 pix' more height I've got now very much, and I'd even miss those additional 220 pix of some 1920x1200 screen (they are much more expensive than 1920x1080: vendors obviously know about their totally different degree of usefulness) to what I have currently.

When I ask, remember Hasselblad, I know they still exist, but I'm referring to their almost-defunct-now 6x6 film format. People say it had not been invented as some new artistic frame to be filled, even though many artists then took it as that, and even today, I'm very pleased, most of the time, whenever I see some well-designed square photography - they've become very rare, as you will discover, now you'll be looking out.

Now, they were meant as the shoot-and-point of the old days, i.e. for handheld studio photography (flash!), and then looking out for something within the frame which could be usable. Anyway, I don't know if this is explanation of the format is the correct one, or if it then just became a handy afterthought: Weren't box cameras even earlier, with 4x4cm on film strips notably? Then, large format cameras came with non-square pane film very early, indeed...

Whatever, it's undeniable that the "ideal" film format is the circle, technically-wise, since lenses are circular, and since we all view that format as unacceptable, since box cameras aren't as needed anymore, for the developments in optical correction, and since it's easy to pivot today's light hand cameras, and since, according to the subject they're after, most leisure photographers even get to decide if they want their photo in portrait or landscape, today's sensor remain rectangle, non-squared, since that way, the same target quality can be reached for less expense, less unused pixels on the sensor.

Now compare again with today's monitors and their pricing, with their sheer availability even, and you'll see that today's market is distorted, the most-frequently bought screens being good for nothing other than for viewing newer Hollywood films, and the next-ideal centre screen, a 1600x1200 (1600x1600 not being available at any price), costing a little fortune or then, around 100 bucks (according to the size, i.e. the pix size) when you're willing to accept an exemplar which is probably 10 years old.

It'll be probably just some of these "refurbished" (which means: dusted and checked for a second: it runs? so it's good to be resold!) 1600x1200 screens as my new main screen, assorted a little bit better to the new large one, with its pixels not too broad, for a better viewing angle, and I'll be done, since even for 800€ and more, I could not get any screen assorted to the pix height of my large screen... except for a similar one, i.e. the same one once more (and for a mere 350€ again), but what should I do with TWO such quite monstruos screens, angled towards me and reaching out for my edge of my desk? At some point, you'll feel imprisoned...

The other viable alternative: Buying a second new screen, but instead of buying a 1600x1200 for 700€ plus which would be more than foolish, an around-220€ 1920x1200; I had briefly thought of returning my current 2540(or whatever it is to the last digit down)x1440 and buying two 1920x1200 instead, but quickly discarded that bad idea: For just some bucks less, I'd not only renounce 240 height pix, but also around 600 pix on the side which, as said, come at least handy here and then, and then they come very handy. It goes without saying though that I'd prefer to buy now a second, but shortened, almost-identical screen, 1600x1440, even at the same price as the larger one (and as we know, that format isn't available either), and yes, I know that I could simply buy a second one of my current kind, then hide its unwanted part behind the other screen (instead of its too much reaching out to me and "enclosing" me: it seems that the positioning angle of my smaller screen is necessarily sharper than the one of my wide screen, in order to withheld a narrow viewing angle for both, and no, I never sit straight in parallel to my desk), but as you certainly imagine, that would have a different but quite as crazy, perhaps even weirder psychological effect.


Aside: I had spoken of the "free tool" MaxTo above, by mistake. In fact, MaxTo had been free years ago, while it's 19$ now, and I meant the (currently still) free MaxMax; both tools are meant to have "maximized" application windows only maximize up to a predefined rectangle, while you can predefinze the boundaries (i.e. the position and the size) of these rectangles seperately for each application in MaxMax, which comes very handy; ditto for the possibility to override this controlled no-that-much-maximizing by pressing some key; in MaxTo it's probably similar.
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As for W10's "Snap" functionality (snapping windows to screen edges or to other windows), it simply doesn't work for me, notwithstanding the fact that I played around many minutes with it, incl. reading all the relevant threads in the web and observing their advice, so MaxMax is a quite handy tool for me, I just have to set it all up correctly (or must macro it all by myself, but see no need to do see, with MaxMax being there).

And I didn't even mention today's ribbons denting into our screens' height... (nor photographer's color needs, but that's easy, that's just a matter of money, not of non-availability). And here's the short version of it all: Make screen sizes plastic in order to make me happy. And yes, there's always the (partial) solution to get glasses, contact lenses or surgery, but had I opted for any of those, I wouldn't have mused about viewing angles in the age of IPS (younger people have a broader field of vision anyway, so probably their parallaxed view isn't as disturbing either). And of course, you could set up a multi-screen farm, any single element pivoted up, but then you'd discover that even 1440 pix large per unit isn't enough and by far, pivoting in 2560x1440 screens is just provided for marketing and for rendering the stand less solid, or then for very special cases of application - oh, I know one of those even, but that's know-how to be withheld.

Let's put it simple: Whenever some lunatic encounters some backpacker, tracking along all alone on his track, or even accompanied by her boyfried or even some other chick, he's ready to kill (I even feared for Sue - and that was in a film! - when Crocodile* left her alone in the outback just for some minutes!); whenever you encounter a dottie in some regex of yours, be it accompanied by a star, a plus sign or else, get ready to kill, too!

*: Btw, they met on the set and have been happy together for 31 years now, that's what I call love! Cheerio!

And here's the mid-length version: Today, in more and more applications which offer search (as for just one example, PIMs; programming languages anyway), you'll encounter the alternative of doing a regex search instead, and that's a very good thing, but it's a fact that many people who use regex even on a regular basis, do so without the necessary knowledge to use it smartly.

It's common knowledge that regex is "slow"; as far as I'm concerned, I've always bewared of the dot indeed, but without knowing and withoutt really optimizing (grouping yes, but not enough excluding yet); in fact, I've always been aware of the fact that even the (regular) "greedy" quantifiers (regularly, not always) give correct results when by my feeling, only the "lazy" ones (available by additional "?" or by leading option code, for the whole expression) should do.

The solution to this apparent contradiction lies in automatic backtracking - well explained in the final link below -, and now you easily understand why regex, doing innumerable backtracks in order to match the text with a (bad) search expression, can be very slow indeed; of course, when we search for something, we want just the search to function well, we don't want to understand how the search is really done, but that's exactly what we first MUST know in order to be able to write effective (or even just "correct") regex searches, and that infortunately means - as a rule with few exceptions -, the better you want your search, the more inscrutable (for a beginner) your search expression will become.

It's evident that if you need such a search expression for some single task, you'll do it quick'n'dirty and will hope for the best, comparing the results with what you will have expected, and if these match, you'll be done with it - look out though for both false positives as for misses, both are so easy to get with approximative regex; whenever you need a search expression to do its work on something again and again, you better had it made as specific for that kind of text as you can, in order to make it fast-and-reliable.

So we encounter a new problem here: The more specific your regex, the higher the probability it will not match given texts, and there's two ways (which I currently see; there may be additional ones) to counter these problems: First, have preliminary scripts (with or without regexes, probably including some of these) to first check your target texts, and to hopefully alert you whenever your main script/regex will not be successful (again, false positives and/or misses) for compatibility reasons - you cannot anticipate any possible issue this way, but you can exclude here most of the "usual suspects" indeed.

Second, prefer "pure-scripting" over regex whenever reasonable, i.e. your regex will be enclosed in some script anyway, so do multiple things on the macro level with that language's commands, incl. searches, cutting up (and checking) text parts (process logic), and keep regex expressions mostly to some further micro processing, i.e. to analysis/retrieval within previously-segregated parts of the individual text. (And let me repeat here that you avoid many a problem by programmatically checking the results of any regex match (or non-match), on the micro as on the macro level.)

This way, it will also become much easier to better target your regex expressions, i.e. to write them in the most specific way there is.

From the links which follow you will learn that even lazy quantifiers will not save your regex expressions from becoming too broad which will not make them necessarily faulty but which will render them, often quite incredibly, expensive (i.e. slow), by the way regex executes the search on the technical level: Group, and be as avaricious as you are ever able to be, with what you grant any such group, instead of counting on regex' capability to clear up from behind the mess you threw at it, at the cost which will come with that unnecessary clearing-up: avoid the backtracking, avoid a backpack weighting ton, to be cleared gram by gram by regex for you when you (your script/search) should run.

(I've got several, now-optimized, regexes which run several seconds on an i7700 with plenty of memory; now imagine those searches running, non-optimized, on some i3, let alone on my old laptop, so our point - see the links - is not trivial.)

As for the long version - the intent of this post being to create awareness only, I'll let do the explaining to the experts -, please refer to the following links:

https://blog.mariusschulz.com/2014/06/03/why-using-in-regular-expressions-is-almost-never-what-you-actually-want

http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html

http://www.regular-expressions.info/atomic.html

And finally this one which explains in depth why and how backtracking can even go completely wild:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/catastrophic.html

There's two, absolutely authoritarian, standard books on regex: Friedl: Mastering Regular Expressions, and Goyvaerts: Regular Expressions Cookbook; I own both, but I admit I never had the courage to really read those books; I've only used them, up to now, for looking up things/explanations, but a quick search for "Regular Expressions" on amazon.com will show you that there are some introductory books on the subject, too, from several other authors, and which may be a little bit more "accessible", or then, on some rainy Sunday, I should have a good look again into the writings I already own?

Goyvaerts is the author of the site regular-expressions.info (the links above) and of several / highly sophisticated regex tools - I never saw the need for me to buy his PowerGREP - was 119€, is now 139€ plus VAT - since I like to write my code myself, so for example (the independent) TextPipe Pro (395$ plus VAT on datamystic.com, here and there available on bitsdujour for a very reasonable price, though) didn't seriously tempt me either, but this latter tool seems to be more in the line of what I've said above about scripting-plus-regex - since behind the scenes, it seems to use exactly that hybrid approach, and in a largely broader way than PowerGREP (i.e. within the files, not only to do the switching between files) - I could be mistaken here, just speaking from their sites' descriptions. On the other hand, when you're a regex expert to the degree Goyvaerts (and Friedl) indubitably are, you can permit yourself to do more in and by regex since writing (correct! fast!) regex expressions will only take you a fraction of time it'd would cost us.

This being said, from his examples in the very last link above, it becomes evident that Goyvaerts' RegexBuddy (30€ plus VAT, https://www.regexbuddy.com/ ) is a highly valuable tool for anyone writing their own regexes, so I'm going to finally buy that one, obviously should have done that before. (You know the lines along which I write, so you know this isn't meant as an advertisement for a product, but as a service to the reader.)