Question

I was evaluating the Enterprise IDE plugin for Eclipse, and ultimately decided not to purchase it. After I uninstalled the plugin, I was left with a bunch of perspective buttons (the ones in the far upper-right-hand corner) which I can’t remove. How do I get rid of the manually, without nuking my workspace?

Edit: To be clear, right-clicking and going to “close” does nothing. Not even an error message.

Answer 1

How did you uninstall that plugin ?

As Daniel details in his answer, Help-> Install new software -> click on "Whats already installed?" is the right way to uninstall a plugin, and should get rid of the perspective as well.

If the plugin was installed in the dropins directory or in <eclipse>/plugins and <eclipse>/features, did you delete all directories/jar in <eclipse>/features, because if that plugin was packaged as a product, it did define in the product extension point a plugin_customization.ini which can indicate some perspective buttons.

If not, the only solution is to have a careful look at your workspace metadata, look for all recent file related to that plugin and remove them.
Make a copy of your workspace first though.

As an example of such a careful look at your workspace metadata", user900975 points out in his answer the <your workspace folder>/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench/workbench.xml file, with <perspectives> element and <perspective> child elements that you can remove.

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Note: Eightball mentions in his answer (upvoted) the possibility to list and delete a perspective.

Since he mentions "Some of them are un-removable. I don,t know why", my original answer above still stands.

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Alexandros adds in the comments:

This helped me fix this, but in my case the file I had to edit while Eclipse was closed was:

.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.e4.workbench\workbench.xmi