RobertoMinelli / PlagueDoctor

Window Plague & Plague Doctor

After short time, during development, your workspace will be crowded with many opened windows. Most of these windows are unused and do not deserve to remain open (this phenomenon is known as the window plague [1]). The Plague Doctor is a tool, inspired by Autumn Leaves, that helps you to mitigate this issue by closing the windows that you are less likely to use in the future [2].

The PlagueDoctor is implemented on top of DFlow, a non-intrusive interaction profiler for the Pharo IDE. In the near future, we will extend the PlagueDoctor with more clever strategies based on the fine-grained interaction data collected with our DFlow profiler.

How to install

To install it look for PlagueDoctor in the Configuration Browser inside your Pharo 4.0 image or run the following script.

Gofer new
  smalltalkhubUser: 'RobertoMinelli' project: 'PlagueDoctor'; 
  package: 'ConfigurationOfPlagueDoctor';
  load.

(Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfPlagueDoctor) loadDevelopment.

The PlagueDoctor can be disabled and customized via its settings. For example, one can disable the coloring option or make the doctor more or less sensitive, i.e., closing more or less windows.

If you want the doctor not to operate on a particular window, just make the window unclosable (using the menu or the 'Cmd + p' shortcut.

References

[1] "Autumn Leaves: Curing the Window Plague in IDEs" by D. Roethlisberger, O. Nierstrasz, S. Ducasse
[2] "The Plague Doctor: A Promising Cure for the Window Plague" by R. Minelli, A. Mocci, M. Lanza