Screen locked in code view

DW8??  Ugh, that's an oldie — circa 2005 & built for ancient operating systems (Win XP and macOS 10.3). 

https://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/dreamweaver/dw8/releasenotes.html

I'm surprised DW8 still runs. Which operating system do you have?

A lot has changed in 16-17 years.

MODERN CODE EDITORS:
-- Adobe Dreamweaver CC - https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html
-- Atom (free) - https://atom.io/
-- Codespaces (free, browser-based) - https://github.com/features/codespaces
-- Nova (Mac only, formerly called Coda) - https://nova.app/
-- Pinegrow - https://pinegrow.com/
-- Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/
-- Visual Studio Code (free) - https://code.visualstudio.com/
-- Wappler ~ Visual Web App Builder - https://wappler.io/

What kind of file are you working with?

Any chance it just doesn't have a design view to see?

I'm pretty sure DW8 still treated "non-design" file extensions (like .txt) as text(code)-only.