Progressives.... not getting along with me

[Rage]

I've decided not to get old :-D - I am still in the denial phase, but I think it will hit me latest when I am not able to read anything on my screen anymore.

Do not escape reality : improve reality !

[Lurk]

Sounds like me some years ago or maybe decades. bifocals drove me up the wall. Trifocals were worse. I finally gave up and went with contacts. They have bifocals, too. Seemed to be more of an average between near and far. Great compromise. Always out of focus. Now I do contacts with mono-vision. One eye for near and one for far. It is surprising. Your eyes just do it for you. My prescription is very light, though. Maybe that makes a difference. I did bounce back and forth between contacts and glasses a few times along the way. Both were frustrating. Mono-vision is what finally worked.

[Slow Eddie]

I had cataract(SP?) surgery in one eye when I turned 64.(Yes SWMBO still needs me and feeds me then and now.) I am now approaching 72. The doctor put in a long range lens in. I now have 20/15 vision for objects 5 feet away or farther. However, when trying to read or look at a computer screen it's all blurry. I got glasses with a lens in the one eye that fixes it. Had to get the proscription changed at first so that it worked up to distances of 3 or 4 feet. I take them off when driving, etc. Took no time to get used to them. I never realized there were so many of us with eye problems!

Wear a mask! The life you save might be your own!

[Harrison Pratt]

You need a second set of glasses optimized for coding. A set of Walmart "readers" may work if you don't have astigmatism or left-right asymmetry in your vision.

[rnbergren]

I have multiple cheap reading glasses. Which drives me nuts. They are only for really close work like carving wood or something. I have progressives. I cannot wear them to write code. Just cannot do it. Reading the notes here. I wonder if I should get some computer glasses with only that midrange single vision just for writting code on a monitor at about 2ft of distance. The progressives are awesome for everything else. Driving Oh my goodness wonderful. Reading. Sure. Playing with the phone. Yep they are great for that as well.

To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer

[agolddog]

I don't recall how long it took to get used to progressives, but it was at least a little while. One thing to get used to is actually moving your head to focus on other things instead of just glancing. A good example of this is stepping off a curb. With single lenses, you just glance down. With progressives, that's your "close" prescription, so the street is all out of focus. You need to get used to actually looking down. I know when I was still developing, there were times that I'd just remove glasses altogether to read the screen.

[obermd]

You didn't by any chance get tri-focal progressives. I found the reading band with these to be too small and dropped back to bi-focal progressives.

[Kirk 10389821]

Charlie, I hate progressives, and prefer bifocals to the point that I had my daughter in bifocals at a young age (she has since outgrown the need for glasses, and that's the point). Myopia can be slowly reversed (I halted my progression 3 decades ago, when I learned it is worsened by getting glasses for near-sighted people, and sitting in front of a computer. You are using binoculars to read the screen, in effect). So I switched to ONE pair of LIGHTLY prescribed reading glasses (the Ophthalmologist fought with me!), and 1 month later, he had to lower the Rx in my REGULAR glasses (used for driving and true distance), he was shocked, and suddenly interested! Amazingly, for 10 years, my Rx never changed (Later I learned if I had lowered my "Computer Glasses" Rx slightly every year, I could have probably reversed further... 30 years later, as in recently). 20 years ago, I got LASIK. I go out of my way to setup my monitors so I do NOT SQUINT or have trouble focusing. I have a 55" 4K monitor, logically divided into 4 monitors of 1920x1080. At 54, I am starting to need reading glasses only for small print (I swear some bottles are using font s that did NOT EXIST 20 years ago)... And that's after spending 10+ hrs/day in front of the computer. After the LASIK I did not wear any glasses. What a gift. == So, my advice, glasses are CHEAP vs. the value of your eyes. Spend a few THOUSAND dollars if you have to making the glasses YOU NEED (finding your recipe). If you need 3 fields of vision, or 2, that's up to you, but the goal should ALWAYS BE: No Eye Strain/No Focusing Effort for each field of vision in front of the computer/reading. How do you accomplish this? I get paper... And I Print out what my screen reflects, trying to match PERFECTLY the screens I look at (I post-it to the monitor, and get it as close as possible). I bring in a book or other text I read in front of me, to the eye doctor (I just saw him for my 5yr follow-up). I have him dilate my eyes, and he holds the paper the same distance my monitor(s) sit from me. He adjusts it forward/back and tells me how far to set my monitors so I don't have to ACQUIRE the image! I then attempt to read the normal paper/books at normal distance. This represents my 2 primary fields. At 54, I can say he said their is NO NEED for glasses, except maybe readers if I want to have them. His father did my LASIK, he has my full history. And if he said I should be using glasses in front of the computer, we would get the S

[Ed C Colton]

Progressive lenses didn't work for me going back over 10 years ago. I went to two sets of glasses, one for distance, and another for closer work. Eventually I simply adjusted things so I can do coding without glasses. Keep in mind I don't use a built-in notebook display, but a 23" flat panel hooked up to two notebooks with a KVM switch.

[Steve Naidamast]

I still use my glasses just for reading and computer work. The only issue I have with my glasses is that when I read, I tend to keep my books closer than a computer screen. As a result, for my computer work, I am still using an old pair of glasses that I got back in the 1990s. They basically still work for me. And I am 70... For distances, I have never really used any prescriptions provided because they seem to make things worse than better. I have an astigmatism in my right eye that keeps changing making any prescription for distance lenses rather useless...

Steve Naidamast Sr. Software Engineer Black Falcon Software, Inc. blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com

[nobody158]

This did not go where I thought it was going to go.

[Bruce Patin]

I only wear progressive eye glasses in the evening at bedtime. During the day, I wear progressive contact lenses. They are unreliable from one set to the other. Sometimes, I need to use reading glasses with them to code.

[SeattleC]

I never got used to progressive lenses. Bifocals worked better for me.

[hal23x]

I am going through this same issue now, except that I do have to have a reading prescription. I've had progressive lenses for about 2 years, this whole time having to have odd setups involving monitors that sit much lower than I prefer just to deal with the fact that I can't see the text on them clearly. I finally got sick of it, so my solution is, after getting an updated prescription a month ago, that I have an appointment tomorrow for a second set of glasses specifically for using with the computer. :|

[sasadler]

Hm, I've the opposite eye problem. Was near sighted in my youth so had to wear glasses to drive. At 68, I can now pass the DMV vision test so I don't have to wear glasses to drive anymore. Now I have to wear cheaters to see close stuff. So I now have 2 pair of cheaters in my computer room, 1 pair in my bath room, 1 pair at the breakfast counter and a pair in each of the vehicles I drive. They're only 1.25x so quite cheap to purchase. I have a friend who got bifocal soft contacts that enable close and far vision. They're built with concentric rings. He says it took a few weeks for the brain to make the adjustment but he really likes them.

[B Alex Robinson]

Same here. Two bifocal glasses. One for normal-driving||reading-close, the other for computer||reading-close. ... after un-cataract lenses put in both eyes. Eyes change in random ways over time, but am still on my original, post-cataract script, as it's close enough to being OK. 3 seconds of looking through progressives told me they ain't gonna happen. Their effect was the same as a cheesy movie from a half century ago showing the main character, drugged.

[jlongo]

I find progressives very annoying. You just want to smash those progressives with a hammer or throw them from a roof.

[jlongo]

Progressives do have their uses. Thanks to progressives you can clearly see the burning buildings, needles and feces in the streets and on the sidewalks.

[jlongo]

I have to live with progressives and I find them dangerously annoying. Thanks to progressives you can clearly see feces and needles on the sidewalk. Like all progressives, you are forced to tolerate them even though you want to beat them with a hammer. I say run progressives over with your car — then backup to do the job right.

[John Wellbelove]

I tried getting progressive lenses (called varifocals here) for computer work. I use a dual screen setup and found that the focus was not consistent across the width. I found myself having to turn my head to look at each screen instead of just glancing across with my eyes. In the end I took them back and got a pair of bifocals. I got the join between the two distances set to a custom height for me so that the join lined up with the base of the monitors.