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!
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.
I meant the latter. I don’t really like systemd and I loved FreeBSD for its simplicity but also can’t use it on bare metal because of a lack of drivers, so this seemed like a great option.
Wow, it’s actually daily driveable? Mind linking me the installation docs, I can’t seem to find em…
Damn, I’m amazed at how pain-free the whole installation/setup process is. Everything sorta just worked. Though, I’m struggling a bit, trying to make zram service with dinit.
I didn’t setup zram but just went for a swap partition and specified it in fstab, so I’m not sure how that works really. There are a few issues open in GitHub about it but there seems to be no activity on them.
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.
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%.
I thought Emacs was an OS? 😏
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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 directoryon any shell I try to launch it with). Is this a simple problem I can fix, or should I run it with Distrobox?deleted by creator
Installing gcompat worked and Lite-XL is running now. Thanks!
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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.
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.
If you don’t mind, can you share your helix config?
Sure. https://gist.github.com/linusr/18cd6f8b0b059073460f0f3c322b8939
Includes both config & languages config.
much appreciated, I just can’t seem to get mine setup right
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.
Codium auto updates itself, yes.
I enjoy VSCode mixed with some Sublime (employer-provided) and Vim in some tmux terminal windows, but I tend to be an oldschool developer who doesn’t really ask for much beyond good syntax highlighting. YMMV.
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I like kate in general but I can’t seem to get it to use semantic highlighting with gopls
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.
can’t exactly change the QT theme in a supported way
Can’t you use qt5ct/qt6ct?
Doesn’t Kate have its own theme options?
I can only change the text editor’s theme but not the UI’s.
Yes you can. UI color is in Settings -> Window Color Scheme. Editor color is in Settings -> Editor Color Scheme. Both are editable separately.
- 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.
Have you tried any of the premade Neovim configurations like Lunarvim or NvChad?
Apart from that maybe something can be done with vscodium in a distrobox container or something, I haven’t looked much into that.
I used lunarvim until I was comfortable enough to use my own neovim setup, can confirm this it is generally a good way to go about doing vim setups.
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.
Helix. It’s modal like Vim but the defaults just work, and a quick “hx --health” will list every mode and what package you need to install for the language server.
Atom?
Is that still being recommended? Last I heard it was eol, no longer getting feature changes or improvements and was basically superceded by vscode.
I’m out of the loop. Thanks for filling me in.
