Shortcuts for marking up a paragraph or a comment in Dreamweaver.
Posted by jerothe in 
I came across these accidentally the other day, but they both rocked my world when I did. I use HTML comments all the time, and I also am constantly marking up pieces of copy with paragraph tags. Now I know the shortcut keypress in Dreamweaver to achieve this.
The shortcut to markup HTML code with a comment;
Step 1: In Dreamweaver, go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Snippts > Comments > (Comment Single Line or Comment Multi Line)
Step 2: Set a shortcut keypress. If you haven’t done anything already with making your own shortcuts, you will need to make a duplicate set. (Obviously, since this is a shortcut, there is a place in the code palette under snippets to add these comments. But we want this to be quick.)
Step 3: When you’ve reset the shortcut hit “Ok“.
Step 4: Highlight a piece of text in Code View and hit your shortcut. Dreamweaver should put it in an HTML comment.
That is a shortcut keypress for an HTML comment. Now, the shortcut in Dreamweaver to enclose something in paragraph tags.
Step 1: Go to Code View. Highlight the piece of text that you want to be a paragraph.
Step 2: Press Ctrl + Shift + P
Like the comment, you can do this from the regular menus, but you want to be quick about it. If you want to know where it is located, just go up to Insert > HTML > Text Objects > Paragraph. Either way, you should now have two awesome shortcuts in your arsenal for quickly marking up code with a comment or a paragraph tag.
Shortcuts for making header tag markup.
Just like bolding text by a simple key shortcut combo, you can also markup your text as a header with a simple keypress.
Here is my header;
Monkeys eat too many bananas from freezer.
Step 1: In Dreamweaver, go to Code View
Step 2: Highlight your text
Step 3: For a header 1 tag press Ctrl + 1. It is the same shortcut all the way up to your header 6 tags. Just press Ctrl, and the number and that is your shortcut for marking up headers in your copy.
How do I format my HTML code? How to I remove the extra blank lines in the code quickly and easily?
Because I am a designer, I am able to read code, but I can’t read it when it is all on one line jammed together. Table tags running into table row tags, that run into the table data tags, and so on. So I spend a good deal of time formatting HTML code if it isn’t already from previous work at Esystems.
Alot of times I will delete whole lines and have blank spaces and have to drag my mouse and hit delete. This is a two step process that I do a ton and this tip will help cut that time down greatly.
To remove spaces in your code, just double-click in any of the spaces, and Dreamweaver will highlight that code and then just hit “delete” and it will take it out.
A small little nuance, but can save a ton of time if you are deleting spaces as much as I do. And in one day I may edit anywhere from 25-50 different web pages.
How do I bold text in Dreamweaver? What are the proper HTML tags to bold text?
By complete accident in using shortcuts, the other day I figured out how to bold text in Dreamweaver using a shortcut in the Code View.Bascially all you have to do, is highlight the text, and press;
Ctrl + B
This will add the <strong> tags, which are the correct tags to use when bolding some text. The old tags, and the less semantic way to bold text using HTML are the <b></b> tags. When I say semantic, I mean using the markup to actual tell what kind of content they contain, mostly for the benefit of impaired users.
<b> tags don’t mean anything to an impaired user. Do they mean boy, ball, or bongo?. At least when you use <strong></strong> to surround text you know that the text inside inside is thicker in weight, or “stronger”.
I had always been aware that I could highlight text in “Design” view and click the “B” button in the Properties inspector, but I didn’t know I could use this shortcut in “Code” view.
Save time with MM Exporter for site definitions
When I was upgrading my computer a couple of weeks back to a dual processer machine at work, I had to reinstall all of my programs.
As a result, I needed to reinstall Dreamweaver, and needed a way to get all of the existing client sites I had set up out of the old computer. Now, if you open your files palette in DW, and go to your file menus > site > manage sites you have the option of exporting each site individually as native site file information “.ste”
That really sounded like a lot of work, so we looked, and found a plug-in that solved all of our problems. To export all of your sites at once into one neat nice file, as well as other things such as shortcuts and even serial numbers, use MM Exporter.
This third party plugin is easy to use. Make sure if you are installing a newer version of DW on a computer, that you only have one installed at once. And before you uninstall anything, that you export your sites using this program. It will only recognize one version of DW to import your site definitions into, and won’t give you an option to find the program you want to import into, instead finding the programs itself.
Change the type of files Dreamweaver recognizes
File types recognition can be changed in dreamweaver when it comes to editing files.
In this particular example I was editing a theme file for an Interchange website, which have a .cfg extension. This is not a format that Dreamweaver knows what to do with, so I have to set this extension to open in code view by default.
Launch Dreamweaver. Under the edit menu you can find the preferences. Click on File types and there you can set in the lower section the application that you want to use to open a particular file type. Like browsers, you can set primary and secondary. This is also where you can add file extensions in the “open in code view†line when editing in Dreamweaver.
Cell select shortcut not working
I am finding that I write a lot more about Dreamweaver, either telling the fact that I use it that much more than any other program, or that it is that much more buggy than anything else. read more
Choose the type of Reports to show when checking html pages
In the Files inspector, under site > Reports, you can easily choose which elements to check for errors or missing information. For example, if you are validating for XHTML 1.0, you can check for missing alt tags in the reports section.
Then when you check, the results will spit out any missing alt tags on images in your web page.
Shortcut for Closing all open DW windows
To close all open windows at once in DW press Ctrl+Shift+W. This option is only available in DW MX 2004, but is a handy tool, and if you haven’t saved any of the files it will prompt you asked whether to save or not before closing.
How do I open any type of text file in Dreamweaver to edit it?
Go to Edit > Preferences.
In there are a lot of categories. You can choose File Types / Editors, and at the top of the screen you will see a form field with many extensions listed called Open in Code View. Type in your extension here, and you can even add it at the bottom and select the primary and secondary programs to edit file with that type of extension.
How do I embed Video and Audio media in an .html document?
To properly insert all of the necessary code to embed uncommon media in a webpage without having to remember, you can use Dreamweaver’s automatic media embed.
Go to Insert > Media > Active X / Plugin
This depends on what you are doing for your selection here.
How to – Dreamweaver automatic link checker
Automated Link Checker in Dreamweaver is highly underrated.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 has the capability to check links sitewide and save you the embarrassment of the dreaded 404 error page.
Under Site > Choose recreate cache.
This will recreate your local cache and make sure all of your local web files are current. Then run check for broken links sitewide, and the reports palette will spit out all of the broken links for you. It is pretty accurate, and will find a myriad things that I guarantee you’d never thought to check for.