An Improved Dreamweaver in CS4?

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

A couple days ago I installed Dreamweaver CS4 and have been pleased with some of the upgrades I have seen. The following are a couple:

Related files
smarter code navigator
code hinting for JavaScript
slick user interface

Related Files

This is a nifty feature to keep from having to open lots of tabs for each one of your files. Dreamweaver now has the smarts to detect includes and dependent files in your HTML / PHP files. For example if you open up a PHP file that includes a header, footer and links to some CSS and JavaScript. Instead of opening these files they are automatically shown and allow you to easy switch between them.

Related files header.inc.php, and footer.inc.php are automatically shown

Smarter Code Navigator

Ever get lost in your code and are not sure what styles you all have and what styles are actually applying. Dreamweaver now has a nice code navigator that pops up and shows you details of what styles are applying to an element. It combines all the CSS files you have included and tells you exactly what selectors and properties are applying.

: CSS rules particular to a div are shown from 3 all related files

JavaScript Code Hinting

This is something that really frustrated me in CS3. Creating JavaScript was not real easy as no code hinting or debugging mechanisms where really installed. CS4 fixes all those problems though. This of course is because of the huge boom related to JavaScript with the introduction of JQuery and the AJAX technology.

Dreamweaver now supports code completion for JavaScript

Slick User Interface

The problem I sometimes have with these huge IDE’s is that the window in which you have to code is small. A lot of the interface is full of clutter such as handy drag-n-drop functionality that I never use anyways. Really the only reason I consider using an IDE is for code completion and code highlighting. I’ll leave all those drag and drop features for the newbie’s.

CS4 addresses this issue nicely by letting us define what type of workspace we want. This can be a coder, web designer, or an application developer. It then adjusts are workspace so that it gives us only the functionality we need to complete our job.

Wrap up

So do I think Dreamweaver has fixed everything? No. One big thing I wish they would do is allow for textmate (Mac OS only) like snippet entry. Something like typing – for [TAB] to get a for loop is much handier than typing it out every time. I guess we will have to wait for that!

If you really want to try this feature out, the closed to a windows alternative I have found is the E-TextEditor.

Let me know what you think. Dreamweaver CS4 an improvement or a step backward?

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