Hello! My question is basically what the title says. I’m searching for an IDE/text editor for Go development and am wondering if anybody knows an alternative to these. Here is the list of software I tried:
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I’ve tried NeoVim but I really don’t want to waste time doing text-based configuration and messing with extensions just to get some basic features working.
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I tried VSCodium but it doesn’t exist in my system software repositories (I’m currently on Chimera Linux), and the flatpak version can’t run any system commands.
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GoLand and Sublime Text are proprietary & paid.
It seems the market for IDEs is pretty small, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if nothing existed that fit these criteria, but thanks for any answers in advance!
Edit: I’ve settled with Lite-XL which seems to be a great editor. Thanks for all of your great recommendations!
I’m currently using Gnome and can’t exactly change the QT theme in a supported way, so Kate is stuck in a light theme. Using Kvantum makes it look like a mix of light and dark theme in a really bad way.
The GTK alternative Geany also doesn’t work well since it’s also sadly stuck in a constant light theme.
Why not just download a binary and/or make your own binary from the vscodium github page?
They’ve got a ton of statically linked ones to chose from that should be simple to just untar and run.
I would really prefer getting the text editor from flatpak or the system package manager for auto-updates, though I’m not sure if the binaries you mention also get auto-updates.
- Install nix.
- nix profile install nixpkgs#vscodium
- nix profile upgrade ‘.*’
Won’t auto update but you could add the upgrade command to a login script or something.
Won’t lie, nix has a high learning curve to get the most out of it, but installing a single app is pretty simple.
GVim is available pretty much everywhere? And it’s infinitely customizable.
It does have a learning curve, but then you get to use that knowledge for the rest of your life.
I’m going to have to take a look at that tomorrow since it has become pretty late here. Although thanks for the suggestion!
I’ve been using vim/GVim for over 30 years; with only minimal tweaks I’ve used it with maybe 15 different programming languages/compilers, a few of which needed custom configurations written to do anything useful.
While everyone else is struggling to get on with the IDE du jour, I just get stuff done without having to learn anything new other than a new syntax and library set.
What do you want an IDE to do (that a straight-up text editor wouldn’t?)
I found emacs to be perfectly fine. Didn’t need an IDE. Go compiler then was astoundingly fast–instant builds, basically. I think newer Go compilers are slower but generate better code. It would be nice to have a compile time flag to turn the slow optimizations on and off, like C compilers have.
Didn’t need an IDE.
That’s actually considered an IDE.
And, these days, runs leaner than vi for single-file editing from a dead start. It’s weird but it’s true by like 1%.
