vim as IDE for Go

Recently, I've been programming more and more in the Go programming language. Since my editor of choice has been vim for the last 10 years or so, I use vim to edit my Go code, as well. Of course, when I'm programming, I want my editor to support me in useful ways without standing in my way. So I took a look how I could improve my vim configuration to do exactly that.

The first stop is in the Go source tree itself. It provides vim plugins for syntax highlighting, indentation and an integration with godoc. This is a start, but we can go a lot further.

If you want auto-completion for functions, methods, constants, etc., then gocode is for you. After installation (I recommend installation via pathogen), you can use auto-completion from vim by pressing Ctrl-X Ctrl-O.

But with auto-completion, we can go even further: with snipmate, you have a number of things like if, switch, for loops that you can auto-complete by e.g. typing "if" and pressing the tab key. You can then continue pressing tab to fill out the remaining parts.

Another feature that I wanted to have as well was an automatic syntax check. For this task, you can use syntastic. But better configure it to passive mode and activate the active mode only for Go, otherwise other filetypes are affected as well. syntastic will call gofmt -l when saving a Go source file and mark any syntax errors it finds. This is neat to immediately find minor syntax errors, and thanks to Go's fast parsing, it's a quick operation.

Last but not least, I also wanted to have some features that aren't specific to Go: first, a file tree (but only if I open vim with no specific file), and second, an integration with ack to search through my source files efficiently and directly from vim. As a file tree, I found nerdtree to be quite usable, and as ack integration, I used this simple configuration snippet:

function! Ack(args)

        let grepprg_back=&grepprg

        set grepprg=ack\ -H\ --nocolor\ --nogroup

        execute "silent! grep " . a:args

        botright copen

        let &grepprg=grepprg_back

endfunction


command! -nargs=* -complete=file Ack call Ack()

For my complete vim configuration, just take a look at it in my dotfiles repository. Enjoy!