Where does eclipse store information about open perspectives etc?

Question

After a recent upgrade to eclipse Juno, I have a problem with eclipse no longer being able to remember certain settings across restarts and workspace switches. Things like which perspectives were open, certain settings like "[x] Open Dashboard" (spring ide) seem to revert to their factory settings whenever eclipse is restarted.

I use Ubuntu and for historical reasons I maintain my eclipse installation in /opt/eclipse. The installation is owned by root, and apart from some issues with upgrades, this has not actually been a problem - until the Juno release.

I have tried chown -R myself:myself on the eclipse installation directory, and I have verified that all files are indeed editable by my own user. Still, the perspectives seem to reset.

Is there any other place where eclipse stores this information, which might still be owned by root?

Answer 1

That information is kept in the .metadata directory in each workspace root directory.

Answer 2

Information about perspectives is stored in
< workspace>\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.e4.workbench\workbench.xmi

Keep this file backed up if you use complicated customized perspectives.

P.S. It's also useful to know that deleting this file may solve the problem when Eclipse doesn't start (see also here)

Answer 3

Two solutions:

1. MENU -> File -> Switch workspace -> Other -> Copy Settings of

   • Workbench Layout
   • Working Sets

2. Copy/backup and replace following folder to new created Workspace.

   • [workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/
   • [workspace]/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/

Personally I prefer (2).

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The above answer is credited to @Ischin, in the following reference...