Sidedocks are side windows which can be placed at any border of a KCachegrind window. They always contain a list of cost entities sorted in some way.

The view area, typically the right part of a KCachegrind main window, is made up of one (default) or more tabs, lined up either horizontally or vertically. Each tab holds different views of only one cost entity at a time. The name of this entity is given at the top of the tab. If there are multiple tabs, only one is active. The entity name in the active tab is shown in bold, and determines the active cost entity of the KCachegrind window.

Each tab can hold up to four view areas, namely Top, Right, Left, and Bottom. Each area can hold multiple stacked views. The visible part of an area is selected by a tab bar. The tab bars of the top and right area are at the top; the tab bars of the left and bottom area are at the bottom. You can specify which kind of view should go into which area by using the tabs' context menus.

Besides an active entity, each tab has a selected entity. As most view types show multiple entities with the active one somehow centered, you can change the selected item by navigating inside a view (by clicking with the mouse or using the keyboard). Typically, selected items are shown in a highlighted state. By changing the selected entity in one of the views of a tab, all other views highlight the new selected entity accordingly.

If there are multiple tabs, a selection change in one tab leads to an activation change in the next tab, be it right of the former or under it. This kind of linkage should, for example, allow for fast browsing in call graphs.

The layout of all the tabs of a window can be saved (View → Layout). After duplicating the current layout (View → Layout → Duplicate (Ctrl++)) and changing some sizes or moving a view to another area of a tab, you can quickly switch between the old and the new layout via Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→. The set of layouts will be stored between KCachegrind sessions of the same profiled command. You can make the current set of layouts the default one for new KCachegrind sessions, or restore the default layout set.