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:

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:

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

Drag and Drop Files

Building

Launching

There are several dialogs associated with launching:

They are configured below in the order shown above:

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:

Perspective Switching

Knowing what Clear All does

But what if I cannot find the settings page? Then my last resort is the ‘clear all’ option:

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:

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

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:

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 🙂