If you asked me to describe my (Go) developer toolchain essentials, I’d probably rattle off… macOS, zsh, git & GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes & kubectl, GoLand, golangci-lint, and ngrok?

But sometimes you don’t appreciate things until they’re gone.

If you practice a tight feedback loop, as I very much do, you could be running go test dozens or hundreds of times a day. Overall, I find the Go testing framework to be lovely to work with, and I consider it an integral part of the platform’s success. However, I feel that the default output format of go test leaves a little to be desired. In large test suites, e.g. as might be seen in a sq test run, it’s burdensome to find test failures in the wall of output.

The -json format is even weaker: it’s just barely structured, and feels like a low-effort addition to make the output technically JSON. But for both of these formats, there’s already a whole tool ecosystem that depends on the current output format details, so there’s little expectation of change.

Enter tparse: it’s a wrapper around go test, and I find its output much more suited to my local dev workflow. Give it a try.

The trigger for this post is that the most recent release of tparse panics on my sq test run. I’ve filed a bug report, but for now I’ve had to roll back to an older version of tparse. Hopefully that’ll be patched up soon, but in the meantime: I 😍 you, tparse. Come back to me.

UPDATE 2023-11-18: The tparse author has fixed the bug, and released v0.13.2, resolving the issue. Huzzah!