Where does Eclipse store settings and plugins in userdir?

Question

I've just installed a new Linux distro on my box and want to move my Eclipse home from the old /home/username/ to my new one. Because I changed the desktop, I don't want to copy all hidden folders from ~/. So which directories do I need copy in order to have all my installed plugins?

I've already copied ~/.eclipse/ and it definitely contains files related to the plugins but Eclipse won't load them. Any hints?

Solution 1

We've eventually found the directory containing all that stuff by accident. Somehow we broke it and Eclipse refused to start on my coworker's computer:-)

See ~/workspace/.metadata/.plugins or wherever your workspace resides.

Solution 2

As far as I know, Eclipse stores its plugins in its installation directory (eclipse). They might reside in eclipse/plugins or eclipse/dropins. You can copy the whole eclipse directory from your old box.

Comments

[Daniel Böhmer]

This is what I had already done and it's obviously not enough…

[Eli Acherkan]

Try running eclipse -clean (help.eclipse.org/helios/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user‌​/…).

[Daniel Böhmer]

eclipse clean didn't help either. Yesterday in the evening I gave up and started installing my plugins (just a few) from scratch. Unfortunately I couldn't finished because EPIC website is down. So any hints are still appreciated.

[Berin Loritsch]

That seems to be just the config files for the plugins.. but not the jar files themselves