Introduction#

Switching from Visual Studio Code to Helix for writing code had me missing the test on save feature for instant feedback I had with VSCode. Switching to a new pane or tab in kitty was a minor annoyance but still an annoyance. Doing some research I found a great solution using fd with entr and gotestsum.

You can use fd to find your go files, entr to watch those files for changes and run tests on file change, and gotestsum to format and display the output. Here’s how.

Install#

brew install fd enter gotestsum

Usage#

fd -e go -E vendor -E gen -E dist | entr -c gotestsum -- -cover ./...

This will setup entr to watch all Go files in the current directory and subdirectories, excluding vendor, generated, and distribution directories.

Gotestsum will output the test results with code coverage information.

I have this setup with an alias gotw to mimic my other go test aliases.

I open a new terminal pane below where I’m working in Helix and run this command. I get instant feedback on test results on every save.