[sat]

>> bloated IntelliJ and the vim plugin as my only option

Bloated it may be but helps me get the job done faster...much faster than I can do it in vim. I work on a mac with 16 GB RAM and thats sufficient for lots of processes. Every bit of the way, I have documentation I can lookup right within as I type, I have autocomplete that always works, I have debugger support to catch little things I missed, tons of libraries and plugins that have stabilized over the years...whats not to like? The downsides (and the reason I looked at go) are both Java and .Net are memory hogs. I needed something more lighter that would offer the same level of productivity during development.

[kasey_junk]

But that's the beauty of the go tool chain. I have a source browser (godef), a documentation browser (godoc), a code style formatter (go fmt), code vetting (vet), unit testing (go test), a linter (golint) etc. and they are all fast command line programs. This means that it is trivial to setup a vim/command line environment the way I like.

In my vim setup with simple key strokes, I can go to the source of, see the type definition of, see the documentation for the call under the cursor. I have formatting, vetting, and if you want compiling on save of the file (and it's super fast). I have autocomplete that behaves exactly as I want it to.

I wish there was better ctags support for go, and the go oracle tool is more prototype than production software, but on the whole I am much happier with my development chain in go than I've ever been on the JVM or .NET.