Reload your plugins without restarting Eclipse

When you are developing Eclipse plugins, sometimes its annoying that the changes in the plugin.xml won't reflect immediately. You need to restart the target Eclipse to see the changes. This will be painful if you are playing with trial-n-error stuff like the menu urls. In this tip, I'll explain how to make Eclipse reread your plugin.xml without restarting the target.

• Create a plugin, launch as an Eclipse Application (you don't even need to Debug, just Run would do)
  
• Check the UI contributions of your plugin.
• Make the desired change in your plugin.xml. Right now, I've changed a Command's name; added a Command contribution to an existing menu; added a new view and made changes to an existing perspective

• In your target, open the Plug-ins Registry view and in the pull down menu, check the 'Show Advanced Operations'

• Right click your plugin and select Disable.

• Then right click again and select Enable.

• Since you have made changes to the current perspective by adding a view, you would be greeted with this Dialog.

• Say Yes. There you go. Now all the changes in the plugin.xml would reflect in the UI

While this may not be applicable for all the changes you make in plugin.xml, this should cover up for most the changes.