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!
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.
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.
What do you want an IDE to do (that a straight-up text editor wouldn’t?)
I just need something that supports gopls and some basic features such as syntax highlighting, reasonable indents, code-completion etc.
I use Neovim, specifically LazyVim. It’s super easy to get up and running with Go.
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!
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.
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?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.
Installing gcompat worked and Lite-XL is running now. Thanks!
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-extractflag and run the AppRun that’s inside of it directly? Or that also fails?Isn’t lite-xl in your distro repo?
There’s also LiteIDE
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.
Atom?
Pulsar is the current maintained fork of that project, we forked it before it got shut down and are actively developing it,
Is that still being recommended? Last I heard it was eol, no longer getting feature changes or improvements and was basically superceded by vscode.
Yes and no. The original project is dead but we forked it and continue to maintain and improve it as Pulsar
I’m out of the loop. Thanks for filling me in.
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.
By chimera Linux, do you mean the gaming one or this one?
Just curious
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…
Yup! The handbook is here.
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.
