Dreamweaver CC 2017 Live view/Live Code prevents me from working effectively

[marco12241959]

I want to turn off Live View and Code View! Permanently.

Somebody please read the following and give me a good reason to not terminate my Adobe Subscription in the next cycle.

I know there are a lot of posts about "new" features in DW CC 17, but so far I have not encountered a post that completely covered the items that frustrate me.

I have been using Dreamweaver since the days of Macromedia. I attended the launch party, so you could say I am an old hand at this.

In the last couple of years Adobe has been trying its best to make me switch to a different text editor.

In this last CC 2017 version, we have reached a level where I am about ready to terminate my monthly subscription and forget about it completely.

It was upsetting enough that Adobe decided to do away with the CSS interface to substitute it with one slower than my own typing, instead of improving on what they had.

Now with the "Live view" and "Live Code"  nonsense, my workflow has been completely strangled. What used to take me minutes becomes an exercise in futility were DW gets in the middle of my workflow and prevents me from doing simple things like inserting a paragraph in my text.

Let me be more specific:

I always liked the way I could split the design and code view to navigate long and complex text pages. Then I used to make a change in either Design or code view to see it reflected in the other view. I have been doing that for years and it works like a charm for some of the work I do.

I used to use DW far more, but now I do most of my HTML and CSS work in Firebug or Chrome. However, I get a lot of MS word documents from my clients that I have to change into HTML, so using the split view in DW really helped making the process easy and intuitive and avoid the usual formatting problems with MS Word.

Now I discover that at times I can no longer directly edit the code or the live view and that if I do, I have to refresh manually in order to see that change reflect in the page. WHY?

Why take something simple and intuitive and drop something in the middle of it that makes it cumbersome and unintuitive. If I hit return, I expect the editor to insert a paragraph and show it to me in both views. If I hit Shift-Enter, I expect a line break. Am I asking too much?

Even refreshing manually, sometimes the code or the view won't update. My code shows something and the live view shows something else. I try to edit a word in Live View and it prevents me from doing it. I enter a return and it does not take.

Even code autocomplete is now much more intrusive than it used to be, without giving me any real benefits in exchange.

I am sure there is some tutorial someplace that can tell me all about Live View, Code View and how they work. Fantastic. When I need it, I'll read it. For now, I just want to edit my HTML and CSS like I have been doing for 15 years and I expect the text editor to delete a word if I select it and hit delete.

I want to be able to make Dreamweaver work the way it used to. How do I do it?

Thank you.

[Nancy OShea · Accepted solution]

Nice kitty.

I won't go into everything in your post except to say this version is a big departure from the old DW so it takes getting used to. There are known bugs and cosmetic issues that need immediate attention and some much loved features were taken away that need to be re-examined.   But all that aside, I'm using CC 2017 right now and I like a lot of it very much.  

I have my workspace set-up to suit my workflow.  As you can see I'm using a dark theme, different code color scheme and I have my Code Inspector open on the left and Design/Live view on the right.  Design View allows you to freely edit whatever you need to.  Live View can edit but there are some limitations to what it can do.

Split view options appear under the View menu.

Realt-Time Preview got in the way of my workflow.  So to get back to the old Preview in Browser (PIB), right click on the open document tab (or a file in your Files Panel) and select Open in Browser.  Hopefully, the developers will add an option for turning off Real-Time Preview with the next dot release.

Nancy O.

[Nancy OShea]

Live Code is only useful to developers who work with server-side programming & who want to see what the code looks like when it's parsed by a server.  YOU CANNOT EDIT in Live Code. Turn it off.

New features summary for the 2017 release of Dreamweaver CC