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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • @4vr@lemmy.caதமிழ்
    13•9 months ago

    Zed now has Linux support.

    And then helix editor works with Go LSP, this is my current daily driver. Even without plugins, helix works better and manageable than vim/emacs. Only thing that doesn’t work is debugger.

  • Daeraxa
    13•9 months ago

    Pulsar is a fork of Atom under active development. We don’t publish a flatpak (yet) but there is a community maintained flatpak for it.

    Otherwise if you want to look at something else I’d give Lite XL, Lapce or even Zed (it has now been open sourced and looks like it has a flatpak available) a look as interesting alternatives.

  • @thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    11•9 months ago

    Distrobox will resolve your issue with VSCode and then some. Run archlinux, debian or whatever you want as a container. Then, install VSCode/VSCodium (and any other apps that Chimera lacks) inside the container OS. This will keep your development environment containerized and safely away from your host OS.

  • @solrize@lemmy.world
    11•9 months ago

    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.

    • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      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%.

    • @hasecilu@lemm.ee
      4•9 months ago

      I really love how LazyVim have support for a lot of languages as Extras. Once I needed Go formatting so, installed Go extra, restarted NeoVim and all was ready, in less than a minute!

    • @fernlike3923@sh.itjust.worksOP
      3•9 months ago

      I just need something that supports gopls and some basic features such as syntax highlighting, reasonable indents, code-completion etc.

  • @emax_gomax@lemmy.world
    2•9 months ago

    Just use vscode. It’s basically the standard text editor for everything nowadays. Eventually you may want to start exploring vim/emacs but no reason to prioritise that now when all you need is something you can write code in that gives you squigglies when you do something wrong.

  • @Samueru@lemmy.ml
    2•9 months ago

    I use lite-xl, it has been very good, but I’m not a Go developer though.

    They also release an appimage and I just did a quick test on a alpine container and it works, so it should work on Chimera as well.

    • @fernlike3923@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2•9 months ago

      lite-xl seems very interesting, but sadly I wasn’t able to launch it on Chimera Linux (I get the error cannot execute command "./LiteXL-v2.1.5-x86_64.AppImage": No such file or directory on any shell I try to launch it with). Is this a simple problem I can fix, or should I run it with Distrobox?

      • @Samueru@lemmy.ml
        1•9 months ago

        nvm I just noticed that the issue is that I had the gcompat package installed in alpine, which fixes that issue you just had, I don’t know if chimera has something similar to it.

      • @Samueru@lemmy.ml
        1•9 months ago

        That’s interesting that it doesn’t work, iirc the biggest difference of chimera is that it uses musl like alpine does.

        Can you extract the appimage with --appimage-extract flag and run the AppRun that’s inside of it directly? Or that also fails?

        Isn’t lite-xl in your distro repo?

  • Em Adespoton
    2•9 months ago

    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.

      • Em Adespoton
        1•9 months ago

        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.

  • @kata1yst@sh.itjust.works
    1•9 months ago

    Try Lunarvim. It’s NeoVim, but ships as a fully functional IDE with easy customization if needed. Honestly I basically just changed the theme, font, and added a preview scrollbar.

    Blazingly fast, extremely functional, endless customization if desired.

    • Daeraxa
      6•9 months ago

      Pulsar is the current maintained fork of that project, we forked it before it got shut down and are actively developing it,

    • @emax_gomax@lemmy.world
      2•9 months ago

      Is that still being recommended? Last I heard it was eol, no longer getting feature changes or improvements and was basically superceded by vscode.