Disable Eclipse plugins per workspace
eclipse, ide, plugins, workspace
Solution
Eclipse (3.6/3.7) has a UI for disabling some plugins. It's under Window->Preferences->General->Startup and Shutdown->Plugins activated on startup. However not all plugins are listed here.
To disable other plugins:
It's possible to have separate configuration (osgi.configuration.area) directories: http://help.eclipse.org/indigo/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.isv%2Freference%2Fmisc%2Fruntime-options.html%23osgiconfigurationarea
Simply copy eclipse_dir/configuration to a new location. Make launchers for each of your workspace and add parameters to your workspace specific launcher, for example: -data workspace_location -configuration new_location_for_configuration_dir .
You can disable osgi bundles (not same as plugins) by removing it's line from configuration_directory/org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator/bundles.info file.
The config.ini file in the custom configuration directory must contain this line:
osgi.configuration.cascaded=false
Problem
I use Eclipse for different projects, each with its own workspace. They need quite a different set of plugins (SVN vs hg vs git, AppEngine vs Tomcat vs OSGi, and so on), and I have all those plugins installed and active all the time, which clutters the workspace quite a bit. I'd like to selectively disable plugins for each workspace.