It shouldn't be. Set the GOPATH once and use any text editor.

Except you have to set it every time you open a shell. You can’t put it into your .bashrc either unless you only ever work on one project. This workflow sucks:

    $ cd projects/foo
    $ export GOPATH=$PWD
    $ cd src/github.com/company/foo
    $ go build

OP was talking about getting started. I also don't understand why you can't use the same GOPATH across multiple projects, especially with godeps?

Multiple unrelated Go projects in different GIT/SVN repositories. GOPATH experience is painful.

Even if they are unrelated you can still use one GOPATH...

I use one GOPATH and work on dozens of projects. I would hate it if I had to change GOPATH often. In Go, if you find yourself fighting the system, chances are you are doing it wrong.

'go get github/user/project && cd $GOPATH/github/user/project'.

And to avoid dependency issues, I use one of the many vendoring tools. Currently 'govend'.

You are limited to one repository. So all your Go projects have to live in one repo.

That's the issue, and it's a big design flaw - do away with this GOPATH

I'm not following you. I work in multiple repos under multiple orgs. I have my personal stuff, my work stuff, projects I've pulled down to contribute towards, and libraries that I want to test out tweaks upon.

I don't have go/src/ checked in. Is that what you mean? If you do that, you are doing it wrong. I have many, many go/src/$org/$project directories, each of them have their own source control (most of which is different git repos). If I am working on my stuff, cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/sethgrid/$project. That is the repo under source control. Do any development I want, push up any changes to that repo. Rinse and repeat. I can then cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/sethgrid/$project2 and do the same. When I want to pull down $project3, I just `go get github.com/sethgrid/$project3` or manually clone it and I can cd over to it and work on it separately.

Maybe I'm not understanding your criticism.

You should try out https://github.com/GetStream/vg, it handles managing of multiple gopaths in such a way that cding to a directory switches you automatically.