Gohint is an alternative linter for Go source code. It is based on golint and inspired by jshint. That is, basically gohint is the same golint plus configuration (plus some extra checks, plus report generators, plus... :) )

To install, run go get github.com/elgris/hint/gohint

Any other documentation you can check at golint's README. At the moment there is not so much difference, but I'm not sure what will happen in future :)

Why you may need it? As golint says:

The suggestions made by golint are exactly that: suggestions.
Golint is not perfect, and has both false positives and false negatives.

But sometimes you want those suggestions to work, so you start to use the tool in your continuous integration. And after that you begin to realize that many of those suggestions do not fit your project and just add noise to health report.

That's why you can try gohint - you can configure it, so it will scream only in case of problems that really hurt your project. Don't try to filter the noise, define your rules and do not produce such noise! :)

Also it can produce reports in various formats, so integration to your CI cycle becomes even easier. At the moment it supports only 2 formats: plain text and Checkstyle XML.

Running gohint

gohint supports 2 options that can be passed:

opt	description
config	path to JSON file with configuration. See above how to prepare config file
reporter	name of reporter to use for output. Supported ones: plain and checkstyle. plain outputs report in plain text (like golint) and is used by default. checkstyle outputs Checkstyle XML

Example:

gohint -config="/path/to/config.json" -reporter=plain

Configuration options

JSON config can contain following options:

TBD...

opt	type	description
package	bool	analyze package comments, definitions, etc
imports	bool	check imports for .
names	bool	check names of functions, variables, etc
exported	bool	check exported types and vars for correct comments and other
var-decls	bool	analyze variable declaration for correctness
elses	bool	check if..else statements for redundant else
make-slice	bool	check making slices for using short syntax
error-return	bool	check list of function's return values for position of error, it should be last
ignored-return	bool	check if there any function call which returned result is ignored
min-confidence	float	minimal confidence value to reduce output, [0..1]