Customizing Dreamweaver

In addition to the strongly recommended changes to Dreamweaver's default settings, you might find you want to customize Dreamweaver's settings to fit your personal tastes. The Preferences dialog box is accessed by selecting Edit > Preferences through the pull-down menus in Dreamweaver. You can access preferences from either within the Site Management window or the document window of any page you are editing.

The Preferences dialog box is divided in two sections: a list of categories on the left and all the options for each different category on the right.

Some preferences of note in the General category:

1. Maximum Number of History Steps: you can increase or decrease the number of steps saved in your history palette (note: the higher the number of history steps, the more memory is required).
2. Faster Table Editing: Dreamweaver attempts to use less memory by waiting to display some changes you have made to tables. Unless your system has low memory, we recommend turning off Faster Table Editing.
3. Insert Panel (Objects Palette): Change the look of the Object palette to display icons with or without text, or to display objects in a list.

Some preferences of note for the File Types / Editors category:

• External Code Editor: Specify the program file for an external HTML editor to work on your code (for instance, HomeSite or BBEdit)
• Reload Modified Files: If you switch out to an external HTML editor, these options allow you to save files when switching programs and to reload a modified file when you switch back to another program.
• File Editors: You can configure other programs to be the default editors for various file type used in your site. For instance, if you are working with .wav audio files using SoundForge, you specify that a .wav file will open in SoundForge if you open it from Dreamweaver's site window. Simply click the + icon in the Extensions column and, after entering the extension, click the + icon in the Editors column to begin browsing for the software. You can even specify several secondary software choices, which will then be selectable by right-clicking (clicking and holding for Mac) on the file in Dreamweaver's site window. There aren't any limitations to the file types for which you can specify the editing software other than that the software is on your hard drive and supports that file type.

Various preferences of note in other categories:

• Preview in Browser allows you to add other web browsers to the preview menu in Dreamweaver
• The document weight download speed can be changed in the Status Bar preferences category. You can also add custom screen resolutions sizes here.
• In the Fonts category, you can change the fonts Dreamweaver uses in the HTML editing window.
• You can add or remove icons from your Launcher menu in the Palettes category of preferences.
• Change the look of Dreamweaver's fonts and regions in the Code Color and Highlighting categories
• Under the Invisible Elements category, you can specify what invisible page elements are displayed as icons in the Dreamweaver editing window (these can include image maps, named anchors, comments, line breaks, and a number of others.