Customising Homesite shortcuts

One feature of Homesite, beside adding some custom functionality, is to add custom shortcuts to any command or functionality. You can not only remap the existing shortcuts to stick to your fingertips, but also add new ones to trigger the new functions of the integration to save even more time. I will suggest some interesting mapping to some functions, but first, as a recall, here is the simple way to map commands with keys.

To access the dialog which will allow you to customise mapping, you can either open Homesite Option (Shift +F8) or right click the toolbar and choose customise in the contextual menu. There are 4 tabs at the top of the dialog : Toolbar - Keyboard shortcuts - Snippet shortcuts - Script shortcuts. The first tab (toolbars) allows you to manage your toolbars : select toolbars, change order, show/hide, add/remove buttons, etc.

So far, select Tridion toolbar : a right click on any button will show its characteristics. Most buttons in the integration toolbar are triggering scripts. It is then possible, not to say necessary to map these scripts with shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts

Most of these are the default shortcuts to Homesite commands. You can customise them as you want

Snippet shortcuts

You can easily create code snippets in Homesite (to insert pieces of code instantly). Same as keyboard shortcuts : map and remap as you want. Moreover , you can share with as many sets of snippets with other user by specifiying, in the options, a path to shared folder, on the LAN for instance.

Script Shortcuts

Homesite is designed so that you can write and use your own scripts and assign a keyboard shortcut to keep them at hand (the same way as you can add a button in the toolbar a assign it to a script). The Tridion integration is nothing more than a set of scripts which allows Homesite to communicate with the TCM server. Assigning shortcuts to these scripts will increase the speed of development with Homesite, as if Homesite was dedicated to Template development.

The following table represents the main toolbar mappings with these scripts. You can now add a shortcut to these scripts (and you'll still be able to use the toolbar, of course) :

Tool	Suggestion of mapping	script file
	save current templates	saveTemplate.vbs
	Save and check in current template	template_checkin.vbs
	Save current template and delete the previous version from history	saveTemplate_nohistory.vbs
	Very useful function. I mapped it with F4 : it will instantly open the selected template or display the selected schema.	goto.vbs
	Ctrl+I sounds good : instantly display related information about the current template	browsePT.vbs
	useful if you still use R4 together with R5	swap2R4.vbs
	useful if you still use R4 together with R5	swap2R5.vbs

(Note that the full mapping is also available in \UserData\toolbars\tridion.tbr).