Is there a way to force Eclipse to open in the default perspective?

Question

Problem:

Whenever I start Eclipse (3.5.2 Galileo) it always opens in the previous perspective I was using. I want it to ALWAYS open in the default perspective, but

Answer 1

If you can find out what that perspective's ID is, you can force Eclipse to reopen with it using the -perspective command line switch (followed by that ID).

Answer 2

There is no setting in the preferences dialog to do that. However, as a hack you can find the last perspective attribute stored in the file: workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml. It's an XML file, and the attribute you want to freeze is: <perspectives activePerspective="...">.

You can use a simple script to alter that setting before running Eclipse.

Answer 3

Run this script before running eclipse:

perl -p0777i.bak -e "s/activePerspective=\"[^\"]*\"/activePerspective=\"org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.J2EEPerspective\"/g" ~/workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml