Window manipulation plays a vital role in multi-tool user interaction, especially for programmers exploring software artifacts, gathering information for better understanding. However, today’s window managers offer only limited means to organize screen contents, which increases cognitive efforts for both tool builders and users. Builders must account for live integration of composite views; users might have to work around disruptive mode errors when actual tasks conflict with the tool’s design.

We follow a pattern-finding approach and present four new verbs for direct window manipulation, which we collected from existing tools and systems. If window managers would offer stash, duplicate, split, and link in a reversible way, we believe that programmers could better maintain flow during exploration activities.