Editors and Integrated Development Environments

This lesson lists some IDE(s) that provide support for Go and show how the configuration of environments provides maximum ease.

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IDE(s) providing Go support #

Various development functionalities exist for editors ranging from Vim and Emacs, text editors like BBEdit, Brackets, Gedit, Kate, Komodo, TextMate, TextPad, JEdit, SublimeText, Atom and Visual Studio Code. Some more IDE-like cross-platform environments exist for Go-programming (some are plugins for existing (Java) environments):

  • GoClipse customizes the Eclipse IDE for Go development (click here).
  • GoWorks is an open-source Go IDE based on Netbeans (click here).
  • GoLand is an IDE made by JetBrains (click here).
  • LiteIDE is a simple, open-source, cross-platform Go IDE (click here).

In most IDE’s you can configure that building also saves and formats the latest changes to the source file. As an example, here’s a more detailed discussion of the free Visual Studio Code plugin.

Visual Studio Code with the vscode-go plugin #

This plugin provides rich development support, including:

  • auto-completion and IntelliSense
  • code navigation and definition look-up facilities
  • code snippets
  • formatting, renaming symbols, generating methods and structs
  • diagnostic linter and error reporting at save time and even while you type code
  • integrated testing, benchmarking and debugging
  • installing go tools
  • uploading code to Playground

Much of this support is implemented as specific Go commands in the Command Palette. Here is a screenshot using the plugin:

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