Allow disabling automatic reconstruction of terminals #2563

[danthe1st]

Summary

This PR adds a preference to disable automatically restoring the open terminals in the terminal view.

Demonstration steps:

• Open Eclipse
• Open a terminal view with multiple terminals
• Close Eclipse while the terminal view is open
• Open Eclipse again
• After navigating to the terminal view, all terminals are restored.

This PR adds a new preference in Window > Preferences > Terminal named Reopen terminals after restart which is checked by default. If unchecked, no terminals will be restored.

Notes

• The terminal preference screen is located in org.eclipse.terminal.control while the related logic is present in org.eclipse.terminal.view.ui. I don't know what the best way to expose these classes is as they are x-internal. For now, I added an x-friends (mainly for documentation) and marked the access with @SuppressWarnings("restriction").
• If you want to have a working terminal from a local "Eclipse Application" run configuration, you might need to add the org.eclipse.cdt.core.native and org.eclipse.cdt.core.<your OS/arch> bundles. I got them from the update site https://download.eclipse.org/releases/2026-09. This PR can still be tested without that but local terminals might just be empty rectangles without those.
  
  
• I assume a small preference addition like this doesn't need a N&N? If one is wanted, I can also create that.

Issues

Fixes #2563

[SougandhS]

Works well ! 👍
Small suggestion..could we move this option to the top of the preference page ? The other settings (colors, buffer size) are all about how the terminal looks, but this one controls whether terminals come back at all after a restart, which feels more fundamental. Having it first would make it easier to find.

[github-actions]

Test Results

    54 files  ±0      54 suites  ±0   56m 16s ⏱️ - 2m 44s
 4 705 tests ±0   4 683 ✅ ±0   22 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 
12 006 runs  ±0  11 853 ✅ ±0  153 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 

Results for commit 3070afe. ± Comparison against base commit 3690a58.

♻️ This comment has been updated with latest results.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR adds a user preference in the Terminal preferences page to control whether previously-open terminals are automatically reconstructed when the Terminal view is reopened after an IDE restart (default: enabled), addressing the workflow pain described in #2563.

Changes:

• Adds a new boolean preference (Reopen terminals after restart) to the terminal preference UI and initializes its default value.
• Gates TerminalsView memento restoration based on the new preference.
• Updates bundle wiring/export metadata to allow the Terminal view bundle to read the preference from the Terminal control bundle (via x-friends + @SuppressWarnings("restriction")).

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 8 out of 8 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.view.ui/src/org/eclipse/terminal/view/ui/internal/view/TerminalsView.java	Reads the new preference and conditionally skips restoring terminals from the view memento.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.view.ui/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF	Adds a dependency on org.eclipse.terminal.control to access preference infrastructure/constants.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/src/org/eclipse/terminal/internal/preferences/TerminalPreferencePage.java	Adds the checkbox field to the terminal preferences page.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/src/org/eclipse/terminal/internal/preferences/TerminalPreferenceInitializer.java	Defines the default value for the new preference.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/src/org/eclipse/terminal/internal/preferences/ITerminalConstants.java	Introduces the preference key and its default constant.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/src/org/eclipse/terminal/internal/control/impl/TerminalMessages.properties	Adds the user-visible label text for the new preference.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/src/org/eclipse/terminal/internal/control/impl/TerminalMessages.java	Adds the NLS field for the new preference label.
terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.control/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF	Adds x-friends to allow the view bundle to access internal preference/control packages.

Suppressed comments (1)

terminal/bundles/org.eclipse.terminal.view.ui/src/org/eclipse/terminal/view/ui/internal/view/TerminalsView.java:719

• restoreState() reads from preferenceStore without ensuring it has been initialized or that TerminalPlugin.getDefault() is non-null. Given other code in this component defensively checks TerminalPlugin.getDefault() != null, this should be null-safe to avoid NPEs in early-startup or test scenarios.

	@SuppressWarnings("restriction")
	public void restoreState(IMemento memento) {
		if (memento == null || !preferenceStore.getBoolean(ITerminalConstants.PREF_RESTORE_TERMINALS)) {
			return;
		}

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[danthe1st]

Small suggestion..could we move this option to the top of the preference page ?

Done in 3070afe.

[iloveeclipse]

Thanks. Please add N&N.