Love Go + HTMX. I pair it with a-h/templ for a bit more type safety on the template, components and partials.
I just shared my whole toolkit too [1], I call it the "GUS stack" -- Go, Unix, SQLite. Inspired heavily by the exe.dev "GUTS" stack [2] but with HTMX instead of Typescript.
Some other Go components in the kit...
- cockroachdb/errors for errors with stack traces
- templ for type-safe HTML templates (with htmx for reactivity and tailwindcss for CSS)
- fuego for an OpenAPI spec generated from web handlers
- sqlc for type-safe code generated from SQL
- modernc.org/sqlite for a pure Go sqlite library
- goose for SQL and Go migrations
- dbos for durable workflows in SQLite
- rod for Chrome / CDP testing and automation
Feels so productive coding, agentic coding, and building and deploying binaries with this stack.
I tried to use templ but it felt more frustrating than ergonomic. Like at that point I'd rather just use react (and I hate react). Just sticking with basic std templates + HTMX sprinkling is good enough for my needs.
I used HTMX on a recent project and really enjoyed it. As a person who knows how the Web worked before the invention of AngularJS and React, I deeply appreciate being able to build actual pages and minimize the amount of JS that has to exist. Vanilla JS works fine, but HTMX basically just substitutes for a lot of boilerplate that you'd otherwise have to create just to do the same event handler stuff over and over.
If you're curious, and you too aren't in love with the "Modern frontend" philosophy, I would recommend trying out HTMX. Of note, the first examples of HTMX on the HTMX site are really basic, but it's much more powerful with a bit more learning.
> If you're curious, and you too aren't in love with the "Modern frontend" philosophy
I'm also going to hesitantly mention sveltekit. From the outside it looks like yet another JS front-end framework but having been forced to use it recently I've learned it actually has great support for the more hypertext-focused design philosophy promoted by HTMX and friends.
While I love both Go and Alex, my experience with HTMX has always ended up being disappointing.
I think the best way to put it, when I'm working with HTMX it feels like the complexity of the codebase is growing at a 2:1 rate compared to the app itself. I always end up with some weird edge case that I can not come out of without some weird hack.
I get why people dislike Node packages, HTMX feels like it's an overcompensating response to that. But the time you save by not having to wrestle with JSON is tripled when you try to make the app actually look or feel good. It takes me 2 minutes to slap together a Mantine template [1] and tap into some of the best UI components, then I can embed the built static assets and end up with the same single Go binary.
We use this[1] little package, which enables chaining together HTMX responses that can be based on an HTML template file, an HTML raw string, or plain text. All but the first being OOB targets. Real example:
I wrote a framework for my own use that uses Kotlin + HTMX - https://github.com/reubenfirmin/zoned. The goal was to see if I could create webapps that were fully typed, end to end. It uses Kotlinx.html, which provides a jsx-ish dsl for writing html.
I did the first 90% by hand, and have done the last 10% (and README) with Claude, just to get it out there.
Seconded on the Alex Edwards adoration. Anyone with the slightest interest in learning Go for web development should pick up both Let's Go and Let's Go Further. They are two of the most approachable, enjoyable and practical introductions to a programming language I've read.
HTMX is excellent. We made it a long way at Convictional[1] with HTMX + AlpineJS, but the eventual transition of our product into lots of live collaborative surfaces had us feeling like we had pushed the envelope as far as we could under modern startup constraints. Unfortunately, frontier models have really hurt development with budding tech that doesn't have the training data presence of things like React.
Love Go + HTMX. I pair it with a-h/templ for a bit more type safety on the template, components and partials.
I just shared my whole toolkit too [1], I call it the "GUS stack" -- Go, Unix, SQLite. Inspired heavily by the exe.dev "GUTS" stack [2] but with HTMX instead of Typescript.
Some other Go components in the kit...
- cockroachdb/errors for errors with stack traces
- templ for type-safe HTML templates (with htmx for reactivity and tailwindcss for CSS)
- fuego for an OpenAPI spec generated from web handlers
- sqlc for type-safe code generated from SQL
- modernc.org/sqlite for a pure Go sqlite library
- goose for SQL and Go migrations
- dbos for durable workflows in SQLite
- rod for Chrome / CDP testing and automation
Feels so productive coding, agentic coding, and building and deploying binaries with this stack.
[1] https://housecat.com/blog/the-gus-stack-go-unix-sqlite
[2] https://exe.dev/docs/guts
Could rebrand to the HUGS stack -- HTMX, Unix, Go, SQLite
I tried to use templ but it felt more frustrating than ergonomic. Like at that point I'd rather just use react (and I hate react). Just sticking with basic std templates + HTMX sprinkling is good enough for my needs.
I used HTMX on a recent project and really enjoyed it. As a person who knows how the Web worked before the invention of AngularJS and React, I deeply appreciate being able to build actual pages and minimize the amount of JS that has to exist. Vanilla JS works fine, but HTMX basically just substitutes for a lot of boilerplate that you'd otherwise have to create just to do the same event handler stuff over and over.
If you're curious, and you too aren't in love with the "Modern frontend" philosophy, I would recommend trying out HTMX. Of note, the first examples of HTMX on the HTMX site are really basic, but it's much more powerful with a bit more learning.
> If you're curious, and you too aren't in love with the "Modern frontend" philosophy
I'm also going to hesitantly mention sveltekit. From the outside it looks like yet another JS front-end framework but having been forced to use it recently I've learned it actually has great support for the more hypertext-focused design philosophy promoted by HTMX and friends.
While I love both Go and Alex, my experience with HTMX has always ended up being disappointing.
I think the best way to put it, when I'm working with HTMX it feels like the complexity of the codebase is growing at a 2:1 rate compared to the app itself. I always end up with some weird edge case that I can not come out of without some weird hack.
I get why people dislike Node packages, HTMX feels like it's an overcompensating response to that. But the time you save by not having to wrestle with JSON is tripled when you try to make the app actually look or feel good. It takes me 2 minutes to slap together a Mantine template [1] and tap into some of the best UI components, then I can embed the built static assets and end up with the same single Go binary.
[1] https://github.com/mantinedev/vite-min-template
We use this[1] little package, which enables chaining together HTMX responses that can be based on an HTML template file, an HTML raw string, or plain text. All but the first being OOB targets. Real example:
[1] https://github.com/cattlecloud/webtools/tree/main/htmxI wrote a framework for my own use that uses Kotlin + HTMX - https://github.com/reubenfirmin/zoned. The goal was to see if I could create webapps that were fully typed, end to end. It uses Kotlinx.html, which provides a jsx-ish dsl for writing html.
I did the first 90% by hand, and have done the last 10% (and README) with Claude, just to get it out there.
I love Alex Edwards. His books and Learn go with tests were my first introduction to the language. Still recommend to this day.
I'm feel inspired to convert some old stuff to HTMX
Seconded on the Alex Edwards adoration. Anyone with the slightest interest in learning Go for web development should pick up both Let's Go and Let's Go Further. They are two of the most approachable, enjoyable and practical introductions to a programming language I've read.
HTMX is excellent. We made it a long way at Convictional[1] with HTMX + AlpineJS, but the eventual transition of our product into lots of live collaborative surfaces had us feeling like we had pushed the envelope as far as we could under modern startup constraints. Unfortunately, frontier models have really hurt development with budding tech that doesn't have the training data presence of things like React.
[1] https://get.convictional.com/
Nice post. Gotta love the GOTH stack
There's no other tool for extracting wasps from stings in flight.
And they claim naming things is hard...
Go + Datastar is simpler, I much prefer it.