Show it Again! (How to Re-enable Hidden Dialogs in Eclipse)

eclipse has a nice feature to ‘shut up’ dialogs: in many dialogs i can select an option so that dialog does not show up again:

‘dont’ show again’ in dialog

but what if i change my mind later on and what to have this dialog to show up again?

clear ‘do not show again’

the window > preferences > c/c++ has an option to clear all the ‘do not show again’ settings:

clear all ‘do not show again’ settings and show all hidden dialogs again

the concern is: this will clear all options, but what if i just want to clear an individual one?

‘prompt again’ settings

here is a list of dialogs and their settings:

workspace at startup

select a workspace dialog

prompt for workspace on startup

drag and drop files

drag and drop file dialog

linked resources settings

building

building project

running in background

launching

there are several dialogs associated with launching:

save resource dialog

wait for build to finish dialog

breakpoints in workspace

errors in workspace

they are configured below in the order shown above:

run and debug launching prompts

build/clean while debug

if i try to do a clean or debug on a project i’m already debugging, i get warned because the binary is locked by the debugger:

clean or build while the program is debugged

automatically terminate debug sessions on project rebuild

perspective switching

confirm perspective switch

switching perspectives

knowing what clear all does

but what if i cannot find the settings page? then my last resort is the ‘clear all’ option:

clear all ‘do not show again’ settings and show all hidden dialogs again

there is a way how to find out which dialogs are hidden. for this i need to compare the settings before and after the clear operation:

first, before clearing, i export the current settings with the menu file > export > general preferences :

exporting preferences

in the next dialog, best to select to export all:

exporting all preferences

then do the ‘clear all’.

after that, export all settings again, to a different file.

then compare the two files (e.g. copy them into a project, select both files and use the context menu compare with > each other :

comparing exported preferences

now i can merge/compare the changes. to import the settings i use the menu file > import > general > preferences .

not that easy, but works

summary

it is not very easy to find the setting to re-enable a hidden dialog. i hope with the above list i cover the most use cases. if you are missing one, then post a comment

happy showing