Setting up Kakoune for Go

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26 June 2022

I’ve been using the Kakoune text editor with Go for about half a year. If you’re not familiar with it, Kakoune is a modal text editor that’s loosely based on vim, but re-designed to make the editing commands simpler and more consistent. Making it work well with Go required adding just a few lines to the configuration file (usually ~/.config/kak):

try %{
    source-runtime rc/tools/format.kak
}

hook global WinSetOption filetype=go %{
    set-option buffer tabstop 4
    set-option buffer indentwidth 0
    set-option buffer formatcmd 'gofmt'
    hook buffer BufWritePre .* format-buffer
}

To clear, this won’t turn Kakoune into an IDE – for that, take a look at kak-lsp or, you know, an actual IDE. It just sets up two things:

• Indentation is done with tabs, and tabs are shown as 4 spaces.
• Go source files are formatted with gofmt before saving. To make that work, the configuration above loads the file format.kak, which is installed with Kakoune, and configures it to use the gofmt command whenever a Go file is saved.