I’m a soft­ware tweaker, I admit it. I like dig­ging in options dialogs — in many appli­ca­tions they’re chock full of extra func­tion­al­ity and cool time-saving tech­niques. Dreamweaver MX 2004’s Pref­er­ences dia­log is no excep­tion — it hides heaps of use­ful options, some of which I con­sider absolutely essen­tial. How­ever, many peo­ple never even look there.

So here’s what I do when set­ting up a new Dreamweaver instal­la­tion. Maybe you’ll find some things here you’ve never looked at — or maybe you can point out some stuff that I’ve missed.

1. Code For­mat
   This first one is a bit of a con­tentious issue. Tabs vs spaces for indents.
   Per­son­ally, I can’t imag­ine why any­one would want to use spaces rather than tabs (or why spaces is the default). Tabs cause less code bloat and dif­fer­ent peo­ple can set their pre­ferred tab size in their own edi­tor. Seems sim­ple to me. But I know some peo­ple like spaces, have their rea­sons, and insist on using them, so all I’ll say here is *I* change the default set­ting, to use tabs.
2. Code Rewrit­ing
   This one is really impor­tant. In a per­fect world, Dreamweaver would have a check­box here, most prob­a­bly checked by default, which would say “Never, ever, ever, ever, under any cir­cum­stances, touch or change my code”. Unfor­tu­nately, there isn’t a check­box like this, so we have to do the next best thing, which strangely enough, is to check at least one of the code rewrit­ing options — lets say “Fix invalidly nested and unclosed tags”. Then, next to “Never rewrite code:” check the box and add every file exten­sion you’re ever likely to deal with in the box of excep­tions. Cold­Fu­sion, ASP, PHP and most other server-side lan­guages are cov­ered already, but you def­i­nitely want to add .htm and .html to the list. Deal with server-side includes? Don’t for­get to add .shtml and .inc or what­ever you use to the list. And add .dwt if you ever use Dreamweaver templates.
3. File Types / Edi­tors
   If you want to open other files in text view, you need to add them the list here. I use Dreamweaver for all sorts of odd jobs, includ­ing look­ing at cgi scripts, perl code, server logs and variously-named text files. Gotta add them all here. If you want to use an exter­nal CSS edi­tor (I’m a big fan of Top­Style Pro) you’ll need to remove .css from the list too.
4. Invis­i­ble Ele­ments
   I’m still a Fuse­box 3 coder, so I always turn off “show con­tents of included file”. It’s a cool fea­ture for some appli­ca­tions, but when you open an fbx_switch file and DW tries to inter­pret the includes for sev­en­teen fuse­ac­tions, even the grun­ti­est com­put­ers get a lit­tle tetchy.
5. Pre­view in Browser
   As well as adding all my test­ing browsers, I always uncheck the “Pre­view using tem­po­rary file” option. Some­times Dreamweaver leaves tem­po­rary files lying around from this fea­ture, and that dis­agrees with my OC tendencies.

Well, that’s about it for the Pref­er­ences dia­log. I’m not going to go into color cod­ing because I doubt any­one takes that as seri­ously as I do. There’s also lots of cool stuff in the Key­board Short­cuts and Tag Library Edi­tor, but I’ll save them for another day.

So, what do you do that I haven’t mentioned?