Keyboard Shortcuts

As you use Dreamweaver, you’ll hit the same keyboard shortcuts and travel to the same palettes and menus time and again; perhaps your site uses a lot of graphics and Flash movies, for example, and you’re constantly using the keyboard shortcuts to insert them. But you may find that, after the thousandth time, Ctrl+Alt+F (⌘-Option-F) hurts your pinkie and uses too many keys to be truly efficient. On the other hand, the things you do all the time—like inserting text fields into forms or adding rollover images—may not have shortcuts at all, so you’re forced to go to a menu.

To speed up your work and save your tendons, Dreamweaver comes with a keyboard-shortcut editor that lets you define or redefine shortcuts for most of the program’s commands.

Dreamweaver stores its keyboard shortcuts in sets. It’s easy to switch between them—a useful feature when you share your computer with someone who likes different keystrokes. Four sets of shortcuts come with the program:

  • Dreamweaver Standard. When you first fire up Dreamweaver, the program turns on this set of keyboard shortcuts. It’s the same one available since Dreamweaver 8, and it matches the keyboard shortcuts found in Fireworks.

  • Dreamweaver MX 2004. Some keyboard shortcuts have changed since Dreamweaver MX 2004—for example, Shift+F5 now opens the Tag Editor window, instead of Ctrl+F5. But the changes are so minor, it’s not really necessary to use this set.

  • BBEdit. If you’re a Mac user with a code-editing past, you may have ...

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