Free Golang IDE (s) on macos (Visual Studio Code / vim)

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a now is Microsoft’s now OpenSource IDE that runs on windows, macos and linux!

Simple set up guide here: https://rominirani.com/setup-go-development-environment-with-visual-studio-code-7ea5d643a51a. Assuming go is installed and ready to do – the download, install and setup took about 5 minutes. Everything just works out of the box and its much less dependency on complex config files and plugins (vs vim).

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Vim (abandoned this for Microsoft Visual Code)

Install these if they are not already:

• iterm2 / macos terminal
• golang (v 1.11 at the time of this post)
• brew
• vim / install with:

brew install vim

• vim-plug and vim-go install with:

# Note that is is executing arbitrary code from an the vim-go repo 
curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim 
git clone https://github.com/fatih/vim-go.git ~/.vim/plugged/vim-go

• Customise ~/.vimrc to enable and configure your plugins and shortcut keys
• Once th ~/.vimrc is added run :GoInstallBinaries to get vim-go’s dependencies

Shortcut keys in this vimrc:

• \ + b -> build
  • if errors occur toggle forward and back through them with ctrl + n and ctrl + m
  • close quick fix dialogue boxes with \ + a
• \ + i -> install
• dif (whilst on func def, delete all contents for func)

Autocompletion sucks though 🙁 so adding neocomplete is a must).

With existing versions of brew installed vim and the introduced dependency of xcode makes the setup time high. I went through this in the past and after a fairly long hiatus from writing code if find nothing is working quite right.