I often end up with lots of empty panes in Eclipse that can only be minimized but not destroyed. How do I close these?
In this screenshot you can see two minimized on the upper left and several on the right hand side. In the center are four more. They only seem to be restorable in the Debug mode.
First of all, what do you mean by pane? Eclipse has:
If by 'pane' you mean document editors, you have problems either with your Eclipse version or most likely one of the installed plugins.
Each View also can be closed (except maybe some project types (perspectives) of which I'm not aware). For CDT (C/C++) you can close practically everything.
I'll recommend you download latest Eclipse version with no plugins, extract it to different folder, and check if that happens again. If yes, please explain more in details (like Eclipse version, perspective you are using, any side plugins, etc).
Also a good places are Eclipse community forum, mailing list and bugz :-)
Select Window -> Reset Perspective. That should reset the current perspective (what you call "mode") to its' initial state, (hopefully) closing all irrelevant views.
Something seems terribly wrong with your Eclipse. Maybe you should reinstall it. It is possible that you installed a buggy plugin.
I had the same problem. For me it helped to go into the right perspective and activate the functionality that caused the window in the first place. Once I reactivated the functionality, in my case "QNX Memory Analysis perspective", I was able to close all the windows one by one.
The conclusion is you have to refill the empty windows with content and then you will be able to close them properly.
So, it's really very easy for this to happen, if you open an editor that's incompatible with the existing editor, you can often end up having to place it outside of the tab list in one of your editor panes, then you might clear or copy that, typically while trying to add that view to a tab list.
In any case, what it's done is create a new editor, and all you need to do is drag some file to that empty editor window giving it some form of context, then close it.
