Chapter 8. Menus and Menu Commands

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 creates all its menus from the structure defined in the menus.xml file in the Dreamweaver Configuration/Menus folder. You can rearrange, rename, and remove menu commands by editing the menus.xml file. You can also add, change, and remove keyboard shortcuts for menu commands, although in most cases it is easier to do that using the Keyboard Shortcut Editor (see Dreamweaver Help). Changes to the Dreamweaver menus take effect the next time you start Dreamweaver or reload extensions.

In a multiuser operating system, when you make changes within Dreamweaver that result in changes to menus.xml (such as changing keyboard shortcuts using the Keyboard Shortcut Editor), Dreamweaver creates a new menus.xml file in your user Configuration folder. To customize menus.xml in a multiuser operating system, edit the copy of the file in your user Configuration folder (or copy the master menus.xml file to your user Configuration folder if Dreamweaver hasn't yet created a version there). For more information, see "Multiuser Configuration folders" on page 104.

If you open menus.xml in an XML editor, you might see error messages regarding the ampersands (&) in the menus.xml file. It's best to edit menus.xml in a text editor; do not edit it in Dreamweaver. For basic information about XML, see Dreamweaver Help.

NOTE

Always make a backup copy of the current menus.xml file, or any other Dreamweaver configuration file, before you modify it. It's easy to make mistakes while editing the menu configuration file, and there's no way to revert to a previous set of menus other than replacing the menus.xml file. In case you forget to make a backup, the Configuration folder contains a backup of the default menus.xml file, called menus.bak; to revert to the default menu set, replace menus.xml with a copy of menus.bak.