It's rare that something related to web development gets me really excited anymore. Most Flash stuff doesn't thrill me. Most Web 2.0 stuff strikes me as Web 1.0 rehashed. But this – this rattles my chain.

Bare Bones Software has just released what might be the most amazing upgrade to their flagship product BBEdit to date. BBEdit 8.5 offers a whopping 160+ improvements over 8.0, but the reason why this baby is such a must-have is one killer feature: code folding.

Code folding is something I've wished BBEdit would do for years. The premise is so simple it's mindblowing: HTML is a language structured around tags opening and closing. You open a DIV tag, you close a DIV tag, you open a TD tag, you close a TD tag. So what if you could hide everything between the opening and closing tag? If you know everything inside a particular tag is kosher, why not conceal it so you can focus on the stuff that might be giving you trouble elsewhere? That's exactly what code folding does, and it's amazing. This is the single biggest improvement to my web development workflow since Adobe added image slicing to PhotoShop/ImageReady. It's that huge.

Okay, well, it may only be that huge to megadorks like me who insist on hand-coding everything, but still... Excellent!