I recently had to move to a smaller desk which can't hold multiple displays... unless I take a saw to various parts of the desk (my 2nd display is a huge, old CRT). So I went down to one display. I feel lost without a place to dump tool palettes, various VS windows, IRC, etc. I might be breaking out that saw soon.

I do everything off a tri-monitor setup.. couldn't imagine not having the space. Though I keep the taskbar in the middle. The downside though was having to spring for the displayport capable display with eyefinity.

DisplayPort -> DVI/HDMI adapters are in the $20 range now. It's a far cry from the cost they were right after eyefinity hit the market.

as nearly everyone has said, yes.
I'ld say in fact it is the single largest thing you can do to improve productivity
IDE = one screen, the program that youre working on = 2nd screen

On my desk there is a monitor and two laptops (one next to the monitor and another one on the right, imagine an "L" setup). But I don't think I will ever need two monitors for the desktop computer. At the moment everything is perfect right this way

One interesting set-up I saw on a desk a few banks away in my office is having 2 monitors, one is tilted back 45degrees the other vertically above it. The guy using it seems to put reference things on the lower screen where one might otherwise put physical books to glance down at and puts editors/shells in the top one.

I definitely need at least two monitors for composing music. I like to have the sequencer window on one and the mixer window on the other. This way my workflow is a lot faster and I don't need to close windows or applications to do my work. When I'm working with movies I usually add my 37" TV as the third monitor, just to have the movie on the big screen.

Here's a photo from a while back (I still have the exact same setup but my desk has a lot of junk on it right now...). This is my work setup.

I put the netbook and extra tablet in as a joke, but you get the idea. Can't bear to code on landscape monitors anymore...



At home I have one landscape as the main monitor and one portrait for coding. (Can't fit any more monitors on my desk at home... and don't use the PC enough to justify having more, haha)