Golang + Vim

Is Golang + Vim worth trying? Definitely, developing an application with this combination is a cool experience. However I tried using it on a bigger project (I was doing bugfix on docker-cli) and that wasn't a pleasing experience, I felt a bit lost and tired of all of these shortcuts and jumping between files, I think it my be a better experience after I get more experience with Vim. Below I am showing how to setup Vim for Go programming. It's my first attempt so it may be still lacking some features :D

Plugins

I have used two plugins to get everything I needed:

Plug 'preservim/nerdtree'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go', { 'do': ':GoUpdateBinaries' }

NERDTree

NERDTree is a cool tool for every developer, as it allows you to create/move/delete files and directories from inside Vim and most importantly it allows you to browse files just like in any other editor. Whole experience was pretty good, I think some stuff is a bit unnatural for somebody who is coming from IDE word, buy you can get used to it. Also there is a lot of stuff that I was able to do which is not possible in VSCode e.g. split screen in both directions at once.

If you want to split screen with multiple files, use s to split vertically and i to split horizontally.

Below you can see my simple configuration for it, as I wanted to make it more approachable:

"NERDtree
map <C-b> :NERDTreeToggle<CR>
autocmd StdinReadPre * let s:std_in=1
autocmd VimEnter * if argc() == 0 && !exists("s:std_in") | NERDTree | endif
autocmd bufenter * if (winnr("$") == 1 && exists("b:NERDTree") && b:NERDTree.isTabTree()) | q | endif
set autochdir
let NERDTreeShowHidden=1

With those I was able to use NERDTree as I like. E.g. with Ctrl+b I can open the tree file view.

set autchdir was really important for me as i usually open vim like this: vim ~/path/to/file and NERDTree wouldn't catch up and root of NERDTree was still in my current location which was annoying.

faith/vim-go

This one is really powerful, I was able to do everything that I was used to after using VSCode golang extension. I think it worked even better than VSCode E.g I always had some issues with importing my own packages, however here that was not a problem. Maybe it was something else, as it uses the same golang tools as VSCode but I thought it is good to mention.

Configuration I used:

"vim-go
let g:go_fmt_command = "goimports"
let g:go_auto_type_info = 1

By default fmt tool uses a different command to format an output so I changed it, as goimports formats code too and does some additional stuff. If you want to read more, check out links at the end of article.

Summary

With those two plugins my developer experience was quite good, but as I wrote at start, only for smaller applications. I feel like I have to get used to Vim a bit more before jumping further with it.

Golang + Vim

Plugins

NERDTree

faith/vim-go

Summary

Further reading