Nik Reiman
Nik Reiman

Reputation: 40430

How do I delete an Eclipse perspective for a plugin I uninstalled?

I was evaluating the Enterprise IDE plugin for Eclipse, and ultimately decided not to purchase it. After I uninstalled the plugin, I was left with a bunch of perspective buttons (the ones in the far upper-right-hand corner) which I can't remove. How do I get rid of the manually, without nuking my workspace?

Edit: To be clear, right-clicking and going to "close" does nothing. Not even an error message.

Upvotes: 38

Views: 21732

Answers (7)

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1330012

How did you uninstall that plugin ?

As Daniel details in his answer, Help-> Install new software -> click on "Whats already installed?" is the right way to uninstall a plugin, and should get rid of the perspective as well.

If the plugin was installed in the dropins directory or in <eclipse>/plugins and <eclipse>/features, did you delete all directories/jar in <eclipse>/features, because if that plugin was packaged as a product, it did define in the product extension point a plugin_customization.ini which can indicate some perspective buttons.

If not, the only solution is to have a careful look at your workspace metadata, look for all recent file related to that plugin and remove them.
Make a copy of your workspace first though.

As an example of such a careful look at your workspace metadata", user900975 points out in his answer the <your workspace folder>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml file, with <perspectives> element and <perspective> child elements that you can remove.


Note: Eightball mentions in his answer (upvoted) the possibility to list and delete a perspective.

delete perspective

Since he mentions "Some of them are un-removable. I don,t know why", my original answer above still stands.


Alexandros adds in the comments:

This helped me fix this, but in my case the file I had to edit while Eclipse was closed was:

.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.e4.workbench\workbench.xmi

Upvotes: 43

Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 165

If you installed a plugin, click Help ► Install new software, then click What's already installed? in the bottom right. Uninstall what you want, the perspective will be removed as well.

Upvotes: 2

Eightball
Eightball

Reputation: 699

Click Window ► Preferences ► General ► Perspectives. Select the perspective you want to delete and remove it. Some of them are unremovable. I don't know why.

Upvotes: 69

Anonymous coward
Anonymous coward

Reputation: 19

I had the same problem after installing a plugin. The answer is quite simple, if not obvious.

  1. Open Window | Preferences
  2. Click General node
  3. Click Perspectives

Find the perspective in the list and then select Delete command on the right.

The list will refresh and your perspective is deleted.

Upvotes: 1

John Amos
John Amos

Reputation: 31

<your workspace folder>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml contains a <perspectives> element with <perspective> child elements. You can delete <perspective> elements and they will no longer appear in the toolbar. Eclipse writes to this file when it exits so your changes will be overwritten if you don't quit Eclipse first.

Upvotes: 3

Eric Tamminga
Eric Tamminga

Reputation:

I was suffering the same problem with a left-over perspective button for SVN repository Exploring. It wouldn't disappear using the close option. However it did disappear after selecting from Window -> Close All Perspectives.

Regards,

Upvotes: 8

Zsolt T&#246;r&#246;k
Zsolt T&#246;r&#246;k

Reputation: 10439

You could also try launching Eclipse with the -clean command line argument. This cleans out the Eclipse runtime cache, so it might fix your problem as well.

Upvotes: 1

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