Created by some of the brilliant minds from Google, Go is an amazing programming language — it is light-weight, open sourced, and suited for today’s microservices architectures. The Golang programming language has become a popular language for developers of all kinds.

Talking about programming, every coder needs a perfect, reliable integrated development environment (IDE) for hassle-free coding experience. An IDE is one of the most extremely useful tools when coding. If in case you don’t know, what is an integrated development environment (IDE), an IDE is a software suite that consists of basic tools required to code software. Usually, an IDE consists of a code editor, a compiler or interpreter, and a debugger. The coder writes and edits the code in the editor, then the compiler translates the code into a readable format (which is executable for a computer). And finally, the debugger tests the code and look for issues or bugs.

In this article, we list down five best IDEs that Golang programmers can use.

Vim

Written in C and Vim Script, Vim is a highly configurable, advanced text editor that provides the power of the Unix editor ‘Vi’, with a more complete feature set. Simply put, it is an improved version of the vi editor. Initially released in November 1991, Vim is also called as “programmer’s editor.” Over the years, it has become so popular that many consider it a complete IDE. That’s is not all, in 2006, Vim was voted one of the most popular editors; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey also stated that Vim is the third most popular text editor. And last years, it bagged the place of the fifth most popular development environment.

Talking about Go coding, Vim’s vim-go plugin comes with all the required elements to provide a hassle-free and smoother environment for Go developers.

Some of the features are:

• Persistent
• multi-level undo tree
• extensive plugin system
• support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
• powerful search and replace
• integrates with many tools.

JetBrains GoLand

Created by Czech Republic-based software company JetBrains, GoLand is a commercial IDE with coding assistance and tool integrations specific for the Go language (it extends the IntelliJ, a Java IDE). The GoLand IDE is designed in such a way that it analyzes the source code, looking for connections between symbols and provide code completion, quick navigation, clever error analysis, formatting, and refactorings.

The latest GoLand version, GoLand 2018.3 comes with additional features that include:

• Change Signature refactoring
• Testify support

Additional tools in the debugger:

• new code inspections and intention actions
• improved code completion
• support for diagrams
• updates for VCS, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Regarding the price of Goland, click here.

Eclipse

When we talk about IDEs, we cannot ignore Eclipse, Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) is one of the most widely used Java IDEs. Eclipse is definitely one those IDEs that developers use when they start out with coding. Having a plug-in architecture that offers a great deal of power, flexibility, and extensibility, Eclipse over the years have gained tremendous popularity. Now, with the GoClipse (which is an Eclipse extension that adds IDE functionality for the Go programming language), Go coders can use Eclipse IDE for their programming. Also, both the Eclipse IDE and GoClipse plugin are not only free but also open source.

Some of the GoClipse features:

• a source code editor
• a project wizard and builder to help report in-editor build errors
• a fully featured GDB debugger support.

Visual Studio Code

Developed by Microsoft, Visual Studio Code is a source code editor that works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The IDE is free and open source and it was released under the permissive MIT License. According to the Stack Overflow 2018 Developer Survey, Visual Studio Code was ranked the most popular development tool.

For Go coder, Visual Studio Code comes with a Go extension — the plugin, vscode-go has a number of Go tools that offers Go coders language features such as IntelliSense, code navigation, symbol search, bracket matching, snippets and many more. Also, Visual Studio’s VS Code offers support for dozens of languages.

LiteIDE

Authored by visualfc, directly targeting to Golang, LiteIDE is a simple, open source Go IDE. The IDE is created in such a way the working with it feels similar to IDEs like Visual Studio. As the IDE is completely Golang focused, its features are considered to most comfortable for Golang coders.

Its features include:

• configurable build commands
• advanced code editor
• extensive Golang support
• code management
• gdb
• Delve debugger
• auto-completion and theming with WordApi
• MIME type based system etc.