Restoring the IntelliJ IDEA "Project tab"

Question

By default the IntelliJ IDEA interface contains the following tabs/panels:

• Project (tabbed to the left)
• Structure (tabbed to the left)
• Commander (tabbed to the right)
• Ant Build (tabbed to the right)
• IDEtalk (tabbed to the right)
• Maven Projects (tabbed to the right)
• Data Sources (tabbed to the right)
• TODO (tabbed at the bottom)
• Web Preview (tabbed at the bottom)

Due to some fiddling around with the settings in one of my projects I've managed to remove all tabs/panels but the following:

• IDEtalk (tabbed to the right)
• Maven Projects (tabbed to the right)
• Data Sources (tabbed to the right)
• Web Preview (tabbed at the bottom)

I'm running IntelliJ IDEA 8.1.

Question:

• How do I the Project tab and the rest of the lost tabs?

Answer 1

go to View -> Tool Windows and click Project or simply press command + 1 on mac.

Answer 2

The (infuriating) answer is that you just need to click the icon at the very bottom left of your screen. Then the project and other tabs will magically reappear. UX #fail

Answer 3

Procedure to recover all tabs:

1. Backup the "damaged" project
2. Create a new project using the same project name as the damaged project
3. Restore the backup of the damaged project, but copy over the .iml and .ipr files which were created when creating the fresh project in the previous step
4. Open the recovered project and then used File > Synchronize to pick up all files in the project
5. The project and all tabs are now restored. Done!

The above procedure has been tested and is known to work.