From the course: Learning Go

Choose an IDE for Go programming - Go Tutorial

From the course: Learning Go

Choose an IDE for Go programming

- There isn't a single integrated development environment or IDE for Go programming that's endorsed or even developed by the Go development team. There are however many plugins for commercial and open-source IDEs that have been created by the Go community or by the IDE vendors. Which you choose mostly depends on what development environments you're already familiar with. You can find a listing of available tools on this webpage on GitHub. If you're an experienced developer who likes working with Eclipse, you can find a plugin for Eclipse here at goclipse.github.io. You'll find a listing of features. Now go back a step and click on installation and you'll find links to the downloads and instructions here. If you're a fan of the Sublime editor, you can find a Go plugin for that also stored on GitHub under Disposaboy/gosublime. The documentation for this plugin isn't as complete as the one for Eclipse and as you can see in this listing, it doesn't seem to have been updated very much recently. But again, if you're a fan of Sublime, the tools are there for you. If you're familiar with and comfortable with IDEs made by JetBrains, the company that makes IntelliJ IDEA, you can try out GoLand. It's available here at jetbrains.com/go. This is not a free tool though. GoLand isn't free, there is a license fee involved. But again, if you're familiar with Jetbrains products, you might want to go that way. And finally, there's my choice, the IDE that I'll be using throughout this course, Visual Studio Code. Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform product, it's completely free and it has support for Go code that you'd hope for. It knows how to color fonts to indicate Go keywords, and it can enforce Go's formatting requirements. It even has autocomplete functionality or as Microsoft calls it, IntelliSense, for the most commonly used Go packages. It can detect your own variable declarations and offer those for autocompletion and it has integrated support for Git. So if you use Git on say, GitHub, you can work completely in the IDE and minimize the amount of time you have to spend on the command line. Working with Visual Studio Code for Go is definitely faster than coding Go in a generic text editor and it's completely free. So again, that's what I'm going to use in this course.

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