The Plague Doctor: A Promising Cure for the Window Plague

Modern Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are often affected by the "window plague", an overly crowded workspace with many open windows and tabs. The main cause is the lack of navigation support in IDEs, also due to the many -- and not always obvious -- complex relationships that exist between program entities. Researchers have shown that it is possible to mitigate the window plague by exploiting the data obtained by monitoring how developers interact with the user interface of the IDE. However, despite initial results the approach was never fully integrated in an IDE. In our previous work, we implemented DFlow, an automatic interaction profiler that monitors all the fine-grained interactions of the developer with the IDE. Here we present a first prototype of the Plague Doctor, a tool that seamlessly detects the windows that are less likely to be used in the future and automatically closes them. We discuss our long term vision on how to fully exploit the interaction data recorded by DFlow to provide a more effective cure for the window plague.