alt Hacker News> There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.
Do you not feel like there's a similar hit from switching full screen windows? Or is your documentation within your full screen IDE?
> Do you not feel like there's a similar hit from switching full screen windows?
I feel like it should be, but in practice it isn't.
Sounds counter-intuitive, I know, but switching between windows on the same screen has near-zero context loss.
I also use a 3x3 grid of workspaces (center one is browser, all the others are dedicated to a single project/context/session/task each), and navigating workspaces (modifier+shift+arrows) also has near-zero contextual hit.
Even more counter-intuitively, while a second screen produces a large and irritating context-switch cost, using a little (physical, pen-and-paper) notepad next to me has even less context-switch loss than switching windows or workspaces do. It happens without me even realising it - sometimes I'd arise from a long session of coding and be surprised at some notes I made while coding.
There's probably something learnable about the human mind in all of this.