Setting Up Your Development Environment

Any text editor can edit Go code, but an editor that understands Go makes learning much easier:

• Visual Studio Code with the official Go extension (by the Go team at Google) — free and cross-platform. On first use it offers to install helper tools such as gopls (the Go language server, which powers autocomplete and inline errors) and Delve (the Go debugger). Accept them.
• GoLand by JetBrains — a full commercial IDE dedicated to Go.

Whichever you choose, turn on format on save. Go code has one standard layout, produced by gofmt, and letting the editor apply it automatically means you never have to think about spacing or brace placement.

To try a snippet without installing anything, the Go Playground at go.dev/play runs small programs in the browser.