Aral Balkan

I'm working in Dreamweaver quite a bit these days as I write the Quick Start tutorials for Flex 2 and there's one feature in particular that I keep wishing worked differently: the Quick Tag Editor.

Since I'm mainly writing content, I spend most of my time in the design view but sometimes I do have to switch to code view to make changes (especially as Dreamweaver randomly has trouble in changing the format of certain tags in design view -- for example, from H2 to Paragraph formatting.) If it's a small change, I prefer to use the Quick Tag Editor which you currently have to enable by right-clicking the tag in the toolbar above the Property Inspector and selecting Quick Tag Editor... from the context menu. Every time I use it, I wish that the Quick Tag Editor just displayed by default in that toolbar. It would save me two clicks and I could spend nearly all my time in design view.

The picture, above, shows my redesign of the feature. If anyone from the Dreamweaver team is listening, please consider this as an enhancement request! :)

I might as well air my two other pet peeves while I'm at it. These are just bug reports, really:

1. Selecting some text and then hitting the context menu key on my keyboard under Windows brings up the context menu but loses my selection. You can't imagine how many times I've been caught out by this one as it's something I usually do without even thinking.
2. Regular text editing shortcuts do not work in text boxes in the Property Inspector. Pressing Ctrl+A when you're in the Link text box, for example, doesn't select all the text in the Link text box. It instead selects all the text in the currently open document. The same focus issue occurs when using Shift+Ctrl+Arrow keys to select whole words to either side of the cursor.

Comments

• THANK YOU...! This really should be shown by default..I hope Adobe consider this..

  by Savvas on 2006-07-24 10:38:10

• Good suggestion, it would be nice if Adobe could stretch to a customisation team who could implement suggestions such as this if there were enough interest. Then release them as downloadable plugins. That would certainly add value to the license fee.

  by DannyT on 2006-07-24 11:05:59

• If you want to edit the tag you have selected, you can use ctrl-T to get the quick tag editor without using the mouse at all. (Hit ctrl-T again if it shows up in the wrong mode). If you want to edit a parent tag, use ctrl-[ to select the parent tag before hitting ctrl-T. Unfortunately, you can't hit ctrl-[ while the quick tag editor is already up, which I would consider a bug.

  by Sho on 2006-07-24 17:20:06

• Hi Sho, Thanks for the tip! That'll definitely help. I still hope that the Quick Tag Editor will be exposed in the future :)

  by aral on 2006-07-25 14:20:51