Introduction

This document lists commonly used editor plugins and IDEs from the Go ecosystem that make Go development more productive and seamless. A comprehensive list of editor support and IDEs for Go development is available at the wiki.

Options

The Go ecosystem provides a variety of editor plugins and IDEs to enhance your day-to-day editing, navigation, testing, and debugging experience.

• vim: vim-go plugin provides Go programming language support
• Visual Studio Code: Go extension provides support for the Go programming language
• GoLand: GoLand is distributed either as a standalone IDE or as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate
• Atom: Go-Plus is an Atom package that provides enhanced Go support

Note that these are only a few top solutions; a more comphensive community-maintained list of IDEs and text editor plugins is available at the Wiki.

Each development environment integrates a number of Go-specific tools. The following feature matrix lists and compares the most significant features.

	vim	Visual Studio Code	GoLand	Atom
Editing features
Build and run from the editor/IDE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Autocompletion of identifers (variable, method, and function names)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Type-aware autocompletion	No	No	Yes	No
Rename identifiers	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto format, build, vet, and lint on save	Yes	Yes	Yes1	Yes
Auto insert import paths and remove unused on save	Yes	Yes	Yes2	Yes
Auto generate JSON, XML tags for struct fields	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Navigation features
Display documentation inline, or open godoc in browser	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Switch between *.go and *_test.go file	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Jump to definition and referees	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Look up for interface implementations	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Search for callers and callees	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Testing and debugging features
Debugger support	No	Yes	Yes	Yes3
Run a single test case, all tests from file, or all tests from a package	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Auto generate tests for packages, files and identifiers	No	Yes	Yes	No
Debug tests	No	Yes	Yes	Yes3
Display test coverage	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Install	Install	Install	Install

¹Possible when enabled via Settings > Go > On Save, go vet and golint are available via plugins. Also runs tests on save if configured.
²Additionally, user input can disambiguate when two or more options are available.
³Available if the go-debug package is installed.