The problem with moving a home office, especially over a long distance, is that at some point, an uncomfortable portion of your office will need to be packed away. While I don’t have to have a lot to do my job beyond my company-supplied 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, I had purchased a Seiki 4K display and was using it as my main code editing screen. Once even the moving boxes we packed up, how was I supposed to work? At some point, I’d need to be able to work without carrying around 3 screens (I’ll admit that I plugged in the third screen just because it was there.)
Fortunately, a coworker had recently pointed me toward Display Menu, which brings back a screen resolution menu for the recent versions of OS X. With that, I was able to crank up the screen resolution to the native Retina resolution of 2880×1800. While I initially did this in the interest of just trying to see how much screen real estate I could squeeze in, it had the added bonus of being able to display almost as much information as the 4K display (ok, about 66% as much, but the 4K display is a monster.)
So, in anticipation of not having my three monitor setup, I’ve been adjusting to working from the Retina display alone. With the higher resolution, that’s very manageable, and it has the added bonus of being able to work in a coffee shop or out on a deck without being an ass or hauling a car load of equipment out. I also have been working from the island in the kitchen, which won’t be packed up for the move. The smaller arrangement takes a little bit of mental adjustment, but it works perfectly fine for programming.
There are still a couple of accessories for the MacBook Pro that I keep in use with the reduced setup: a Magic Trackpad and a Matias Laptop Pro keyboard. Somehow, these accessories make the workspace feel more like a desktop. It’s probably because moving workspaces involves an armful of equipment and more than one trip, just like a full desktop spread would.