I have no idea how I managed to program in PHP for years without Xdebug. Now when an error occurs, it just pops up in my IDE, and I can set breakpoints and see ALL of the local variables including the ones set in the higher up scripts. It makes debugging sooooo much easier.

I feel kind of silly for not assuming a tool like this existed and hunting for it. I'll never write a var_debug() again. I wonder what other absolutely vital tools are out there that I'm just completely oblivious to.