In this lesson, you're going to learn about managing code preferences in Adobe Dreamweaver. I have Module 4 set up. This is linked to the lesson files from the Module 4 lesson files folder. We're going to go over to our Files panel, and we're going to double-click on index.html. In this lesson, we're going to talk about working with code preferences. We're going to click on the code tab up at the top so that we strictly see our code view. Dreamweaver is known as a WYSIWYG program. What you see is what you get. You don't necessarily need to know how to code in order to be able to use Dreamweaver. However, Dreamweaver is a very sophisticated code editing tool. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how you can change the preferences so that Dreamweaver works the way that you want it to when you work in code view. If you are on a Windows machine, you're going to go to the Edit menu down to the bottom two preferences. If you are working on a Mac, you're going to go to the Dreamweaver menu to Preferences. Now, when we open up our preferences, you can see over here on the left there are a number of different categories. So we're going to look through some of the code categories. So we're going to click on Code Format first. If you look at the document that we have open, this talks about how the code is formatted. So as you can see, it's going to indent with two spaces. So this is what helps us read the code a little bit easier and see where the nesting happens with that code. So you have the ability to change that information. We also have in the Advanced Formatting, there are tag libraries. So if we click on this button, what this will do is take us in and we can specify exactly how our tags are going to look when we apply them. So you can see the first tag here is the A tag or the Action tag. So there's going to be no line break. It's going to be formatted but not indented and the case is going to be the default case. And that's because the A tag is an inline tag. But if we scroll down to our Body tag, you can see how there's a line break before, inside and after. That tag, it is formatted but not indented and it has a default case. So you can see down here the preview has the Body tag alone on a line by itself. So you have control down to each individual tag as to how that information is displayed. We're just going to click OK, pass that and leave that at the default. Now the second area we're going to go into is the code hints. Now this is one of my favorite things because this allows you, if you're going to be writing out your code, this allows you to choose how that code is going to be written. So if we go here at the top, the closed tags, by default, it's set to after typing the open tags. And what that gives us, I'm just going to click on that and click on the apply button. And then click on close. And if we click down in our header area, I'm on line 19, I'm just going to hit the enter key. And if we open up a div tag, as soon as we click on that close angle bracket, you will notice that the close div tag comes up. Now this is a great thing to do if you're doing a lot of typing inside of these tags. We're going to select that and just delete that for right now. If we go back up to the edit menu or to the Dreamweaver menu, depending upon whether you're a Mac or a PC, and we go to our preferences, back to our preferences. I'm going to choose the after typing open carrots slash as how to close my tags. And I'm going to explain why we do that in a second, but we're going to talk about the enable code hints. This is great because if you start to type a tag, it will come up with a drop down menu of some of the options that you have. We also have an auto insert braces and auto insert quotes. So when you need quotes, they will be there. So we've got some really great things with that code hints. So I'm just going to click on this apply button and close. And so here, if I open up my div tag, again, you'll notice this time no tag closes. But if I type in this is some content, as soon as I do an open carrot and a slash, Dreamweaver closes that tag for me. So what's really the difference here? Well, if you're using tables, if you're using lists, this is great because if you missed closing one of your tags, when you go to close a tag and it's not the tag that you thought it was supposed to be, Dreamweaver is helping you kind of find any coding errors. So that's one of the things that I like about this feature is that it will help you when you are coding. Now, we're going to go back to those preferences one more time because I want to talk about two additional options that we have. The first is under the fonts area, and this is how large our code is on our screen. Now, I have mindset to largest, which is 16 points. It's great for me. I wear glasses. This allows me to really see my code, but you can choose how large and if I click on that apply button, you can see it's much smaller. So it really depends on how large you need your text to be as far as how big your font is in your code view. And the last thing we're going to talk about is the interface. Now, with the interface, we can choose how light or dark the overall look of Dreamweaver is right here in the application theme. But we also have the ability to change the colors in our code view. So by default, it is set to dark because I have the darkest theme here. But if I want to, I can go to Classic and click on this apply button. And I can see that it's got a white background with lighter colors for my text. I can go to Monokai, which is a variation of the dark theme but just has some pinks and blues and yellows in there. We have a Raven dark and you can click on the apply button for any of these to see which color theme works best for you. I'm going to go back to that dark theme because that's what I like. I'm going to click on that apply button just to make sure everything's good and we're going to click on the close button. So in the preferences, you have the ability to make Dreamweaver work the way that you want your code to look when you are using code view. In this lesson, you learned about managing your code preferences in Adobe Dreamweaver.
