Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

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 you use a lot of graphics and Flash movies on your site, for example, and you’re constantly using keyboard shortcuts to insert them. 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 have no choice but to go to a menu.

To speed up your work and save your tendons, you can define or redefine shortcuts for most Dreamweaver commands using the program’s keyboard-shortcut editor.

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, but you’ll most likely never need to switch from the standard set:

• 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.

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

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