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.

The My design for Dreamweaver’s Quick Tag Editor feature article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.