How to change custom perspective icon in eclipse?

Question

I want to change my custom perspective icon in eclipse. I searched a lot, but I did not find a solution.

Answer 1

If you saved an existing perspective with a different name as your custom perspective, you cannot change the icon.

You will need to determine the perspective by writing a small Eclipse plugin to be able to change the icon.

Answer 2

You can change the perspective icon by updating the iconURI attribute of the iconURI definition in the workbench.xmi file. This file is located inside the workspace metadame directory. e.g. /My-Workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.e4.workbench/workbench.xmi .

There are usually two lines with the iconURI attribute. For example:

 <children xsi:type="advanced:Perspective" ... iconURI="platform:/plugin/com.atlassian.clover.eclipse.core/icons/cview16/clover.gif" tooltip="Clover"> 

and

 <snippets xsi:type="advanced:Perspective" ... iconURI="platform:/plugin/com.atlassian.clover.eclipse.core/icons/cview16/clover.gif" tooltip="Clover"> 

The icon URI is the path to the image in the Eclipse plugin. (Plugins are located in the {ECLIPSE_HOME}/plugins directory.)

The workbench.xmi file must be edited after closing the Eclipse IDE, because the file will be overwritten when you exit Eclipse.

In this example, I created a custom perspective called Clover, changing the Java Perspective available in Eclipse and saving it as "Clover". My perspective originally had the same icon as the Java perspective:

So, I closed Eclipse, changed the icon paths in workbench.xmi , saved the file, opened the IDE again and got a new icon:

Note. I am using Eclipse 4.6.0 (Neon), but this solution will work for all versions of Eclipse 4.

Answer 3

Open plugin.xml for your plugin; Go to the "Extensions" page; and select the perspective extension (in org.eclipse.ui.perspectives: you must enter your custom prspective here). There is an icon attribute that you can set for your custom perspective. (I am using Neon2)