A little Dreamweaver selection trick

It never ceases to amaze me that I can work in the Adobe products day in and day out and still learn little tricks. Forgive me if you are already know this but just learning this helps to save me time and to save my eyes so I need to share it with you.

Have you ever wanted to select a portion of code from one page and paste it into another? Have you ever tried to scan the code with your eyes finding it difficult especially if you didn’t comment your code out or space it out very well? The easiest way for me has always been to scan the design view for the section that I want in the layout and then see what dreamweaver is highlighting in the code. Then I would touch the code view and select the text. The only problem then is that I would loose my selection and invariably I would miss a character or some angle bracket and I would have to figure out what went wrong. It wasn’t until the other day that I discovered that you must touch the center scroll bar between the code view and the design view to switch the active window that has the selection. Your selection will remain in tact but the focus will be different.

In the example above I selected the listed items on the right side that is the design view and it highlighted the code on the left that made this text. If I were to then touch the middle of the code view on the left I would loose my selection and would have to reselect. If instead I touch the scroller in between I can now copy the contents of the code view to the clipboard. If I touch the scroller to the right of the design view I shift my focus back again in design view and I can copy that.

Whew! It’s the little things in the day that can make it for ya huh?!!

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