Over the past year I’ve been coding a lot in Go. Being used to working in mainly Java for the past 15 years I got used to shortcuts and other useful aids within Eclipse and 
IntelliJ. Don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan of Sublime but mainly use it for Markdown, Javascript and Python. I wanted try Go in one of the IDE’s I was familiar with.
First let’s try Eclipse
I immediately thought I would try it within Eclipse with the Eclipse Go plugin. My initial experience proved it was not ready for prime time. It had many errors in the console, standard eclipse delays and it was a pain setting up the Go path properly.
Meet the IntelliJ Golang Plugin
After my loss with Eclipse I decided to see if IntelliJ had a plugin and sure enough it did. I downloaded the plugin from Jetbrains website and began installation. After the plugin was installed I went into the global configuration to point the plugin to my global Go installation.
Being optimistic I decided to create a new project using my current go path. Voila, it immediately worked and let me get to work.
What I like about it so far:
- You get the nice code hint dialogues when writing code against a function
- It supports
gofmtso you can keep your code up to standards while working - Inline
godocsupport - Ability to run and debug within the IDE
- Any much more
I strongly anyone who has come from the Java world and are used to IntelliJ to try this plugin out.
