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Gogland IDE

Apr 6, 2017

Love them or hate them, with the right feature set, it’s hard to deny that IDEs can make software development a lot more efficient. Text editors like vim, SublimeText, and Atom have plugins that can make software development a lot easier, but they’re typically still limited in scope to what they can do.

Don’t get me wrong – I use vim, SublimeText, and Atom on almost a daily basis (some plugins work better in one than the other), but I’m when writing Go code, JetBrains’ new Go IDE, Gogland is surprisingly well done.

Unlike PyCharm which tends to feel bloated, Gogland feels refreshing and lightweight, it supports various GOPATH usage patterns (per-project and global), and most importantly for me it does code completion and back-to-definition / usages very well.

For a language like Go that prides itself with a pattern of commonly viewing language internals, pressing Command+B to instantaneously be zapped to the definition of a function (whether in your own project or the Go source) is really handy. The same keyboard shortcut repeated displays a list of places in your project where that function is used. This is such a useful feature and one that all of the other Go-supported IDEs and text editors failed to support well enough for my liking.

If like the Go language, do yourself a favor and go download Gogland!