Things I've stopped using in GNU Emacs for working on Go

December 31, 2019

In light of my switch to basing my GNU Emacs Go environment on lsp-mode, I decided to revisit a bunch of .emacs stuff that I was previously using and take out things that seemed outdated or that I wasn't using any more. In general, my current assumption is that Go's big switch to using modules will probably break any tool for dealing with Go code that hasn't been updated, so all of them are suspect until proven otherwise. For my own reasons, I want to record everything I remove.

My list, based on an old copy of my .emacs that I saved, is:

  • go-guru, which was provided through go-mode; one of the things that I sort of used from it was a minor mode to highlight identifiers. To the extent that I care about such highlighting, it's now provided by lsp-mode.

  • gorename and the go-rename bindings for it in go-mode. In practice I never used it to automatically rename anything in my code, so I don't miss it now. Anyway, lsp-mode and gopls do support renaming things, although I have to remember that this is done through the lsp-rename command and there's no key or menu binding for it currently.

  • godoctor, which was another path to renaming and other operations. I tried this out early on but found some issues with it, then mostly never used it (just like gorename).

  • go-eldoc, which provided quick documentation summaries that lsp-mode will now also do (provided that you tune lsp-mode to your tastes).

  • I previously had M-. bound to godef-jump (which comes from go-mode), but replaced it with an equivalent lsp-mode binding to lsp-ui-peek-find-definitions.

  • I stopped using company-go to provide autocompletion data for Go for company-mode in favour of company-lsp, which uses lsp-mode as a general source of completion data.

All of these dropped Emacs things mean that I've implicitly stopped using gocode, which was previously the backend for a number of these things.

In general I've built up quite a bunch of Go programming tools from various sources, such as gotags, many of which I installed to poke at and then never got around to using actively. At some point I should go through everything and weed out the tools that haven't been updated to deal with modules or that I simply don't care about.

(The other option is that I should remove all of the Go programs and tools I've built up in ~/go/bin and start over from scratch, adding only things that I turn out to actively use and want. Probably I'm going to hold off on doing this until Go goes to entirely modular builds and I have to clean out my ~/go/src tree anyway.)

I should probably investigate various gopls settings that I can set either through lsp-go or as experimental settings as covered in the gopls emacs documentation. Since I get the latest Emacs packages from Melpa and compile the bleeding edge gopls myself, this is more or less an ongoing thing (with occasional irritations).

Written on 31 December 2019.
« A retrospective on our OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers
The good and bad of errno in a traditional Unix environment »

Page tools: View Source, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Tue Dec 31 18:33:59 2019
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.