Trial-screens setup: the definitive guide

You got your sec­ond mon­i­tor. You've seen how much it en­hances (or de­grades) your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Now, you are dream­ing of hav­ing three mon­i­tors. Or maybe you don't have dual-screens set­up and you're jump­ing straight to three mon­i­tors set­up. Or maybe you don't have any mon­i­tor at all and your an­ces­tors be­lieved three is a no­ble num­ber? (It ac­tu­al­ly is¹.)

In all those cas­es, you may find a few in­ter­est­ing points in this ar­ti­cle.

Use­ful­ness

Any per­son should have two mon­i­tors, be­cause some­times, it comes in handy. The prob­lem is that two mon­i­tors take a lot of place, and the sec­ond mon­i­tor is use­ful at most once per week for an or­di­nary per­son. That's why they don't have two mon­i­tors.

De­sign­ers and de­vel­op­ers are not or­di­nary peo­ple. They need a large amount of desk­top es­tate on dai­ly ba­sis, be­cause they are con­stant­ly run­ning mul­ti­ple ap­pli­ca­tions at the same time, and need to see them at the same time as well, be­cause switch­ing be­tween ap­pli­ca­tions wastes pre­cious time.

Two mon­i­tors in­crease our pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, be­cause they re­move the ex­cise as­so­ci­at­ed with switch­ing be­tween ap­pli­ca­tions. This comes at a price of Fitt's law, i.e. time wast­ed mov­ing the mouse. Two as­pects should be not­ed here.

• The large space brought by two screens means that cur­sor ac­cel­er­a­tion should be in­creased (un­less we ac­cept that we oc­ca­sion­al­ly run out of real space by mov­ing the mouse too far away), which means that pre­ci­sion is low­ered, i.e. it gets hard­er to point at a spe­cif­ic ob­ject if this ob­ject is small.

• Stop­ping at the edge of the screen is not pos­si­ble if there is an­oth­er screen. In­stead of four edges, we find our­selves with three. Giv­en that the edge we lose is the one where Ubun­tu puts its dock­bar, this is an­noy­ing.

  Un­like Win­dows, Ubun­tu uses sticky edges, which means that the cur­sor will stop at the edge any­way if you're not mov­ing it fast enough. This is smart and works pret­ty well: in­deed, it doesn't stop most of the time when I in­tend to move to an­oth­er screen, and it stops when I in­tend to move my mouse to the dock­bar. This be­ing said, the ex­pe­ri­ence can be op­po­site for oth­er per­sons.

While the ben­e­fit of a sec­ond mon­i­tor are ob­vi­ous for de­sign­ers and de­vel­op­ers, adding a third mon­i­tor is hard­er to jus­ti­fy. Two mon­i­tors work well for most sit­u­a­tions we en­counter dai­ly: code on one screen, brows­er on an­oth­er; code and brows­er on one screen, real-time logs, real-time per­for­mance or real-time CI re­port­ing on an­oth­er. Makes sense. Three mon­i­tors may make sense in the fol­low­ing sit­u­a­tions:

• One should han­dle code, brows­er and real-time stuff at the same time. Makes sense, but it doesn't oc­cur too of­ten. If I work with code and real-time feed­back, I don't use the brows­er enough to re­quire it to be con­stant­ly vis­i­ble. It may re­main at the back­ground and brought to front only when need­ed. If it is es­sen­tial to keep an eye on real-time feed­back, the brows­er will re­main on the same screen as code. If it is prac­ti­cal to have code and brows­er at the same time, it may re­main on the same screen as real-time stuff, or share half of the screen with code.

• One has a lot of code to work with. This is ac­tu­al­ly my case for the last week: I have to set up a serv­er which will host an ap­pli­ca­tion (count three ter­mi­nals with vi show­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion files I'm edit­ing and two ter­mi­nals for in­vok­ing com­mands) and at the same time view the source code of the ap­pli­ca­tion it­self (three to five ter­mi­nals of source code). A brows­er should be vis­i­ble as well, since I strug­gle a lit­tle with Lin­ux con­fig­u­ra­tion. But hav­ing that much code quick­ly be­comes prob­lem­at­ic. While I per­son­al­ly en­joy be­ing able to see every­thing at the same time, tab pages will prob­a­bly in­crease the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of most de­vel­op­ers, and maybe mine as well. Some­how, it's like com­plain­ing that you have a small mon­i­tor be­cause can't view the whole body of your 600-LOC method at once: the size of your screen should be your least con­cern here.

• One should mon­i­tor real-time data on one screen while work­ing on code on an­oth­er mon­i­tor and read­ing stuff on the third one. It may hap­pen on oc­ca­sion, but work­ing like that ten hours per day is crazy.

• One works on two mon­i­tors and watch­es a video on the third screen. This will nec­es­sar­i­ly de­crease the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by af­fect­ing how the per­son is fo­cused, which is cor­re­lat­ed with the num­ber of bugs, so this be­hav­ior should be dis­cour­aged.

• One works on two mon­i­tors and keeps the third one for unim­por­tant stuff. For ex­am­ple, a web de­vel­op­er can have source code on one screen, a brows­er for man­u­al tests on the sec­ond one, and a brows­er for oc­ca­sion­al help from Stack Over­flow on the third one. While this makes sense and doesn't af­fect neg­a­tive­ly the fo­cus of the per­son, the brows­ing is not that im­por­tant to re­quire a ded­i­cat­ed mon­i­tor.

• One talks on Google Hang­out while hav­ing a lot of stuff on two oth­er mon­i­tors (for ex­am­ple dur­ing a meet­ing with a re­mote team). In this case, the third mon­i­tor can be handy, but be­ware of peo­ple you're talk­ing with: they may not un­der­stand why are you look­ing in dif­fer­ent di­rec­tions all the time. When I was talk­ing to oth­er peo­ple with even two screens, they were of­ten ask­ing me what I'm look­ing at and com­plain­ing that I'm not look­ing to­wards the cam­era when talk­ing to them.

Es­sen­tial­ly, a third mon­i­tor doesn't bring as much as the sec­ond one, but can even be an is­sue, since it's dif­fi­cult to fo­cus on so many things at the same time. Dual-screen mon­i­tor makes your work dual: code and brows­er, code and re­port­ing from CI serv­er, Adobe Il­lus­tra­tor and a brows­er for help, Adobe Pho­to­shop and pic­tures for in­spi­ra­tion or ref­er­ence, etc. More of­ten than not, the third mon­i­tor is just awk­ward and un­prac­ti­cal.

Be­fore pur­chas­ing a third mon­i­tor, make sure you know ex­act­ly why do you need one and how would it af­fect your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. If you still de­cid­ed to pur­chase a third mon­i­tor, think about the way you'll po­si­tion it.

Con­fig­u­ra­tions

Switch­ing be­tween con­fig­u­ra­tions is rel­a­tive­ly easy and fast. For ex­am­ple, I use pyra­mid con­fig­u­ra­tion, but oc­ca­sion­al­ly switch to stack+por­trait con­fig­u­ra­tion when I need it for half an hour. I takes twen­ty sec­onds to move the mon­i­tors in new po­si­tion, and an­oth­er twen­ty sec­onds to ad­just them with pre­ci­sion.

Pyra­mid

I found it to be the most prac­ti­cal con­fig­u­ra­tion. Two mon­i­tors are po­si­tioned side by side, and the third one is raised above them. The bot­tom ones are usu­al­ly used for pri­ma­ry work, and the one above them is more for back­ground mon­i­tor­ing. The user stays fo­cused on one of the screens, while her pe­riph­er­al vi­sion cov­ers the oth­er two mon­i­tors—thing which is im­pos­si­ble with curve con­fig­u­ra­tion de­scribed lat­er.

The im­por­tant thing is that mov­ing win­dows (and cur­sor in gen­er­al) to the top mon­i­tor can be chal­leng­ing be­cause of Fitt's law. In­stead of mov­ing the cur­sor in a straight line, you'll of­ten need to use a third point.

An­oth­er draw­back is that de­pend­ing on the an­gle of the mon­i­tor and the stance of the user, both the view­ing an­gle of the top mon­i­tor and the dis­tance from the eyes can make it dif­fi­cult to view the top of it. I have this prob­lem re­cur­rent­ly when I use the third mon­i­tor for logs mon­i­tor­ing, then stop the tail -f, clear the ter­mi­nal and start typ­ing a com­mand: I have to move for­ward to see what I'm ac­tu­al­ly typ­ing.

You may also be un­able to see the very bot­tom of the third mon­i­tor, since a few mil­lime­ters can be hid­den by the two oth­er mon­i­tors:

This usu­al­ly hap­pens to me when I ad­just them while sit­ting straight, but can't see the bot­tom if I start to bend. From my ex­pe­ri­ence, this is still a mi­nor is­sue. One may sug­gest rais­ing the third mon­i­tor, but this would make the top of it more dif­fi­cult to read. It may re­quire mul­ti­ple read­just­ments to find the po­si­tion which works well for you.

Curve

In this con­fig­u­ra­tion, all three mon­i­tors are po­si­tioned side by side. The cen­tral one is used for pri­ma­ry work—this is the mon­i­tor you'll stare at most of the time. Two oth­er mon­i­tors are sec­ondary, giv­en that when you're look­ing at one, you'll be prac­ti­cal­ly un­able to see the one on the op­po­site side, the pe­riph­er­al vi­sion be­ing too nar­row for that. (If, un­like me, you don't have to be close to the mon­i­tors, this is­sue might be ir­rel­e­vant for you.)

Per­son­al­ly, I would use this con­fig­u­ra­tion only when forced by the en­vi­ron­ment. If you don't have mon­i­tor arms (see be­low), you may have no oth­er choice than to use this con­fig­u­ra­tion. If you have some­thing above your mon­i­tors, such as shelves with books you need to ac­cess on reg­u­lar ba­sis, this con­fig­u­ra­tion may be the only valid one. Fi­nal­ly, if you're work­ing in an open space, hid­ing be­hind three 24-inch mon­i­tors may not be per­ceived well by your col­leagues (un­less you're ugly and un­lik­able, in which case, they'll only be hap­py about the wall of mon­i­tors.)

Ben­e­fit:

• If you have some­thing, such as shelves with books, above your mon­i­tors, or if you're work­ing in an open space, this con­fig­u­ra­tion may help.

Draw­back:

• The area is too large to cov­er vi­su­al­ly. If you're look­ing at the mon­i­tor on the right, you won't be able to see the mon­i­tor on the left.

Stack+por­trait

This is the con­fig­u­ra­tion where two mon­i­tors are stacked, while the third one is ro­tat­ed 90° and po­si­tioned at the left or right of the first two. This con­fig­u­ra­tion is ide­al when you're work­ing with large amounts of text and you want to see the most of it. For ex­am­ple (see the im­age), fol­low­ing Mon­goDB repli­ca­tion tu­to­ri­als was much eas­i­er with­out hav­ing to jump back­ward and for­ward all the time.

Make sure you check that the im­age is dis­played cor­rect­ly by the mon­i­tor when it's po­si­tioned in por­trait mode. Some per­form quite well; oth­ers are ab­solute­ly ter­ri­ble, with an im­age not lit uni­form­ly (see mon­i­tors sec­tion be­low).

Ben­e­fit:

• Por­trait mode makes it easy to work with large amounts of text or code.

Draw­backs:

• You have to align the mon­i­tors. If you don't, there is an im­por­tant gap be­tween the mon­i­tors, mak­ing it awk­ward to use.

• 16:9 as­pect ra­tio looks to­tal­ly weird in por­trait mode. Con­sid­er a 16:10 or 4:3 as­pect ra­tio in­stead.

• Some mon­i­tors (see be­low) may be un­able to dis­play an uni­form­ly lit im­age when ro­tat­ed.

• You con­demn the por­trait mode mon­i­tor to be used for one win­dow only: stack­ing two win­dows won't make sense, be­cause you'll lose the ben­e­fit of por­trait mode.

Hard­ware

So what to buy, where to start, what to ex­pect and what to check be­fore mak­ing the pur­chase?

GPU

It is es­sen­tial to check that your cur­rent GPU ac­tu­al­ly sup­ports three mon­i­tors. It doesn't mat­ter how much ports there are on the rear pan­el: my moth­er­board has three of them (VGA, DVI and HDMI), but I can con­nect ei­ther VGA and DVI or VGA and HDMI, be­cause it sim­ply can't use DVI and HDMI at the same time.

In gen­er­al, you won't find this sort of in­for­ma­tion in con­struc­tor's mar­ket­ing ma­te­r­i­al, nor in re­views, since of­ten they don't even men­tion dual-screen se­tups. You may check the man­u­al, if avail­able be­fore pur­chase, or spec­i­fi­ca­tions, al­though most spec­i­fi­ca­tions won't con­tain such de­tail. If un­sure, ask on hard­ware-re­lat­ed fo­rums.

Per­for­mance-wise, with my GeForce GTX 660, there is ab­solute­ly no is­sue us­ing three mon­i­tors when do­ing “or­di­nary things.” By or­di­nary things, I mean run­ning a few desk­top ap­pli­ca­tions which will work with any GPU on one mon­i­tor, an HD video on an­oth­er one, and some hard­ware-ac­cel­er­at­ed web ap­pli­ca­tion in a hard­ware-ac­cel­er­at­ed brows­er on the third one, full-screen.

I'm us­ing it both in Ubun­tu 14.04 and Win­dows 8.1. Both stay pret­ty well re­spon­sive.

As for the games which make use of two or three mon­i­tors, I'm pret­ty sure a more pow­er­ful GPU will be re­quired. For any­thing else, in­clud­ing run­ning one-screen video games, the GPU such as GeForce GTX 660 is large­ly enough. And it costs just $175 at the time of writ­ing.

By the way, if you use a lap­top (why would you do that, se­ri­ous­ly?!), tri­al-screens set­up (the lap­top's mon­i­tor be­ing one of the three mon­i­tors) may not be sup­port­ed (and of­ten isn't). The fact that you can con­nect a mon­i­tor di­rect­ly to a lap­top and an­oth­er one to a dock is ir­rel­e­vant: the GPU may refuse to use both at the same time, leav­ing you with two ex­ter­nal mon­i­tors only but not the lap­top's mon­i­tor, or one ex­ter­nal mon­i­tor and lap­top's one.

Mon­i­tors

Choos­ing the right size is a dif­fi­cult task. Small mon­i­tors are ter­ri­ble, but large ones may not fit, es­pe­cial­ly if you have three of them. An­oth­er im­por­tant point to con­sid­er is that all mon­i­tors should be of the same size, so once you've cho­sen one, you should stick with it.

Per­son­al­ly, I find 24-inch 1920×1080 mon­i­tors the most prac­ti­cal for me. Small­er res­o­lu­tions are sim­ply too small: with 1920×1080, I can put two ter­mi­nal win­dows side by side and still have a place. 23-inch mon­i­tors with the same na­tive res­o­lu­tion strains my eyes when used for ten hours a day. 25-inch mon­i­tors and larg­er won't be an is­sue with dual-screen set­up, but would be prob­lem­at­ic with three screens (see be­low why).

How ex­pen­sive those mon­i­tors should be? It most­ly de­pends on how much do you care about your eyes and com­fort. $200 per mon­i­tor seems a good start­ing point. When choos­ing a mon­i­tor, be aware of the fol­low­ing points:

• The mon­i­tors should have a VESA mount (also called FDMI, but most­ly known as VESA mount). With­out such mount, the mon­i­tor is use­less. Some mon­i­tors, in­clud­ing ex­pen­sive ones, don't have one. If the mon­i­tor has some fan­cy de­sign, there is a chance it lacks VESA mount.

• There are sev­en vari­ants of VESA mount. The ones which are used near­ly every­where are VESA MIS-D (ei­ther 100×100 for any or­di­nary mon­i­tor or 75×75 for very small mon­i­tors). If you pur­chase a very, very spe­cif­ic mon­i­tor, check twice the VESA mount vari­ant.

• When us­ing the VESA mount, you should be able to de­tach the stand base of the mon­i­tor. Some mon­i­tors claim that you can de­tach it, but you can only do it par­tial­ly. For ex­am­ple, my LG 24EA53, I aban­doned every ten­ta­tive to dis­mount one of the parts of the stand base af­ter I in­jured my­self try­ing to re­move one of the parts. Since then, the re­main­ing part is scratch­ing my table.

  

  ^{Acer V243HL is a good ex­am­ple of a mon­i­tor which be­haves well with a VESA mount: the stand can be re­moved com­plete­ly. No­tice how ca­bles are ori­ent­ed to­wards the bot­tom of the mon­i­tor which makes it easy to mount the mon­i­tor to the wall, but the ca­bles can still eas­i­ly be bent in or­der to avoid be­ing seen.}

  

  ^{The guys who de­signed LG 24EA53 should be fired; it is com­plete­ly un­us­able with VESA mount, be­cause it scratch­es the table and the ca­bles are point­ing to­wards the rear of the mon­i­tor, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to im­pos­si­ble to mount to a wall.}

• Fan­cy de­sign may be an is­sue. Check that the base of the mon­i­tor is flat, and not curved. Since you will put the mon­i­tors side by side, en­sure that the frame is not very large, in­clud­ing the bot­tom.

• But­tons on front are bet­ter than but­tons at the bot­tom, be­cause you can ac­cess them more eas­i­ly. On the oth­er hand, it of­ten oc­curs to me that the mon­i­tor on the right is push­ing the pow­er but­ton of his neigh­bor on the left: if the but­tons are on the bot­tom, this will not hap­pen. Ro­tat­ing the mon­i­tors 180° would be a so­lu­tion, but due to ClearType and sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies, text will be more dif­fi­cult to read.

• Even­tu­al­ly, some brain-dam­aged con­struc­tors may come with de­signs where ports are too low and ori­ent­ed to­wards the ground. In this case, you'll have a hard time bend­ing the ca­bles and not touch­ing the table. Note that if ports are ori­ent­ed to­wards the rear of the mon­i­tor and not the ground, this is OK, un­less you want to mount it on a wall.

• Hold firm­ly the side of the screen when it's turned on. Do you see white spots? Pick the mon­i­tor where the frame is sol­id enough to pre­vent such spots, since you'll even­tu­al­ly move the screen by hold­ing it ex­act­ly like that. I'm not sure whether pres­sure on the pan­el it­self can dam­age the mon­i­tor, but in all cas­es, every man­u­al of every mon­i­tor tells that in or­der to clean it, one should wipe it very gen­tly.

• Hold the mon­i­tor di­ag­o­nal­ly and try to bend it. If it bends, this is not good. My LG 24EA53 bends a lot, which is quite scary when the mon­i­tor is VESA-mount­ed.

• In some con­fig­u­ra­tions (see above), IPS mon­i­tors are nice to have as they would per­form slight­ly bet­ter com­pared to TN ones. This be­ing said, both my TN and IPS mon­i­tors per­form equal­ly well in all three con­fig­u­ra­tions.

• If you pick a con­fig­u­ra­tion (see above) where one of the mon­i­tors is ro­tat­ed 90°, it is im­por­tant to test how well the mon­i­tor per­forms vi­su­al­ly when turned. My ac­tu­al mon­i­tors per­form cor­rect­ly, but the one I had be­fore was ter­ri­ble, be­cause when ro­tat­ed, it im­me­di­ate­ly ap­peared that the tubes be­hind pan­el it­self are not light­ing the mon­i­tor even­ly, so the im­age ap­peared much lighter at two sides of the im­age than in the mid­dle.

Check what your GPU sup­ports in terms of in­ter­face. If you can con­nect two DVI and one HDMI, make sure two of your mon­i­tors have a DVI port and one has a HDMI port. Most mon­i­tors have DVI ports. Some don't have HDMI ports.

Mon­i­tor arms

Mon­i­tor arms are an es­sen­tial and manda­to­ry part of the set­up. I'm us­ing Er­gotron LX Desk Mount LCD arms, and they are just ex­cel­lent. The qual­i­ty is out­stand­ing; the arm is well thought, very ro­bust and per­forms well. It's a sort of thing that you use for sev­er­al decades, which makes the $145 price ridicu­lous­ly low. I suc­ceed­ed dam­ag­ing one of the arms, but un­less you're com­plete­ly wild, they will re­main in per­fect con­di­tion (dust doesn't count).

The spec says that the arm can sup­port a 32-inch mon­i­tor, or, in terms of ca­pac­i­ty, up to 11.3 kg. Those arms feel very sol­id and I won't hes­i­tate to use them for flat pan­els of more than 32 inch­es.

The only prob­lem I en­coun­tered with this arm is that it is too low for the top mon­i­tor. This is ac­tu­al­ly not an is­sue for two rea­sons. First, I for­got that the po­si­tion of one of the parts can be ad­just­ed, which would in­stant­ly solve my prob­lem. Sec­ond, Er­gotron has a vari­ant called tall pole (but re­tail­ers rarely have this mod­el) for cas­es where even ad­just­ing the con­cerned part will not be enough.

Er­gotron also has a LX Dual Side-by-Side arm. It can be a good choice, since it will cost slight­ly less than two or­di­nary arms, but make sure you can fix the arm at the mid­dle. On my desk, I can only fix such arm at its right or left side, which means that such arm is not a so­lu­tion for me. You may also buy two or­di­nary arms but use only one of the two bases. This gives you the flex­i­bil­i­ty lat­er to switch to two bases. This is how an Er­gotron arm is fixed to the desk:

An­oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ty is to fix the arm to the wall di­rect­ly. This gives you more com­fort if you use the pyra­mid con­fig­u­ra­tion. The draw­back is that you might not be able to eas­i­ly switch be­tween con­fig­u­ra­tions (but it de­pends most­ly of how pre­cise­ly you fix the arms.)

Most im­por­tant ben­e­fits of hav­ing mon­i­tor arms:

• You're free to po­si­tion the mon­i­tors as you wish, as well as ro­tate them. Any stand bases I've used were too lim­it­ed in terms of move­ments, in­clud­ing the ones which al­low to ro­tate the mon­i­tor.

• Read­just­ing the po­si­tion is as easy as it can be. Any stand bases I've used made it par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to ad­just the po­si­tion; some made ter­ri­ble noise full of suf­fer­ing, giv­ing a hint that they will crack in a near fu­ture (as well as giv­ing to your cowork­ers a hint that you're mur­der­ing a cat and en­joy­ing it.)

• Drag­ging the key­board un­der the mon­i­tor be­comes pain­less.

• You can po­si­tion a mon­i­tor above an­oth­er one—some­thing you ab­solute­ly can't do with a stand base.

• Ca­bles are man­aged. You don't have a desk space full of ca­bles any longer (which is es­pe­cial­ly help­ful when clean­ing the desk from dust).

Such arms make the pyra­mid con­fig­u­ra­tion not only pos­si­ble, but very nat­ur­al. By ad­just­ing the an­gles of two screens at the bot­tom and one screen at the top, you can have an ex­cel­lent view of all three mon­i­tors when sit­ting straight, as soon as the third mon­i­tor is used for sec­ondary tasks only, be­ing too far from the user's head.

Ca­bles

This is eas­i­ly for­got­ten, but there is a risk that with three mon­i­tors set­up, the ca­bles which come with mon­i­tors will be too short. When buy­ing ca­bles, re­mem­ber that they will have to go along the arm parts (un­less you want them to hang down or lie down, which is ugly).

Thick ca­bles can't be bent enough to be put in­side the mon­i­tor arm. This is for ex­am­ple the case of my ten-me­ters VGA ca­ble I use to con­nect the mon­i­tor to the serv­er (the ca­ble can be seen on the im­age al­ready shown above; com­pare it to the DVI and C13/C14 ca­bles which fol­low the arm on the im­age.) I also had a lot of pain us­ing the flat HDMI ca­ble (it has a form sim­i­lar to a SATA ca­ble, but slight­ly larg­er and heav­ier; the ca­ble can also be seen on an im­age al­ready shown above.) Al­ways pre­fer cir­cu­lar-shaped HDMI ca­bles; most should bend well enough to be put in­side a mon­i­tor arm.

Some mon­i­tors have spe­cif­ic adapters in­stead of us­ing or­di­nary C13/C14 ca­bles. This sucks, be­cause they are usu­al­ly short, and there is no easy way to make them longer (and is hell if you want to plug the screens into a pro­fes­sion­al UPS.) Al­ways pick a mon­i­tor which uses stan­dard C13/C14 ca­bles for pow­er.

Over­all cost

• GPU: $175
• Mon­i­tors: $200×3
• Arms: $145×3
• Ca­bles: $15×3

For only $1,255, we have our set­up, giv­en that you pay $435 for in­de­struc­tible, high-qual­i­ty mon­i­tor arms you can al­ways reuse some­where else if need­ed.