Copy-and-Paste Between Overlapping Windows

Copy-and-paste, one of the fundamental operations of mod-ern user interfaces, can be performed through various means (e.g. using the keyboard, mouse-based direct manipulation or menus). When users copy and paste between two differ-ent windows, the process is complicated by window man-agement tasks. In this paper, we propose two new window management techniques to facilitate these tasks in the par-ticular case of partially overlapping windows. We describe an experiment comparing four commonly used copy-and-paste techniques under four window management conditions – non-overlapping windows, partially overlapping windows, and partially overlapping ones with one of our two window management techniques. Results show that our new win-dow management techniques significantly reduce task com-pletion time for all copy-and-paste techniques. They also show that X Window copy-and-paste is faster than the other three techniques under all four window management condi-tions