How can I change custom perspective's icon in eclipse?

Question

I want to change my custom perspective's icon in eclipse. I have searched a lot but I didn't find any solution.

Answer 1

The icon for a perspective can be changed by updating the iconURI attribute of the perspective's definition in workbench.xmi file. This file is located inside the .metadata directory of the workspace. 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 a path to an image within an Eclipse plugin. (Plugins are located at {ECLIPSE_HOME}/plugins directory.)

The workbench.xmi file needs to be edited after closing the Eclipse IDE, because the file gets overwritten when you exit from Eclipse.

In this example I created a custom perspective named Clover by modifying the Java Perspective available in Eclipse, and saving it as "Clover". Initially my perspective had the same icon as the Java perspective:

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

Note: I use Eclipse 4.6.0 (Neon) but this solution would work for all Eclipse 4 versions.

Answer 2

If you stored an existing perspective under a different name as your custom perspective, then it is not possible to change the icon.

You would have to define the perspective by writing a small Eclipse plugin to be able to change the icon.