I've been a rabid fan of BBEdit for years. Having developed Glossary (Clippings) add-ons and promoted it to my clients and staff. I wasn't sure how it could get better, but code folding is almost worth the upgrade. Almost.

There are issues and items with 8.5 that should give the user of 8.2.6 or earlier pause. One of them is speed. 8.5 is noticably slower on my PB867, where typing can significantly lag behind my fumble fingers by one or two seconds, or longer. Launching is a bit slower, than 8.2.6 (and a lot slower than v6), but no worse than GraphicConverter and not nearly as bad as large apps like Word or Photoshop or Canvas.

There are a number of interface changes made, but not uniformally throughout the app. For instance, opening via FTP presents a new dialog layout. I'm not certain it is any more efficient than the old layout. And if you want to see the old layout, simply use the Save-to-FTP command. The old interface is still used for this command. Why not be consistant? For me, the old GUI was perfectly fine. I don't need eye-candy to work with a program, but I do seek consistency. It makes me feel like the coder(s) have paid attention to visible details as well as the more important details under the hood. It appears that 8.5 is truly a transitioning product, and future releases may well clean up dialogs, commands, and other odd behavior 8.5 has introduced. At least, that's my <b>hope</b>.

As a universal release, it's slowness might only be apparent on PowerPC-based systems. As for functionality, the code-folding alone is NOT worth the upgrade from 8.2.6 at the price of what appears to be some additional attention to the PowerPC side of things. I'd recommend buying the upgrade if you are moving to an Intel-based system, but hang on to what is working well for you on your PowerPC Mac.