I'm growing increasingly weary of my current editor lot and am in the market for a new one. What I'd like is something akin to the Visual Studio editor. You know, syntax highlighting (easy) as well as on-line lookup for functions/instances, project management, etc.
It would be especially nice if the editor would integrate with the FPGA primitive libraries so I can get parameters and usage information just like in Visual Studio.
Visual Slick Edit seems somewhat close, but is pretty rough around the edges for its price tag. Anyone?
emacs or xemacs with verilog-mode. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it has many many great features, including mostly-automatic netlisting of upper levels in your hierarchy. Search for both using yahoo, you'll find them. -Stan
I still like Aldec for design entry. Editor is very much studio editor like, plus you can run sims right there as well as > I'm growing increasingly weary of my current editor lot and am in the
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--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.
not to forget the signal completion, complex templates, and things like semi-automated instantiation and testbench-generation :-) This all is at least true for the XEmacs VHDL-mode.
Heh, I appretiate Aldec cos it is not studio-like as opposed to Xilinx's WebPack. And more feature rich and its level ov integration of different tools (like jumping to errorous code line and more).
I use UltraEdit, too. I also run emacs Verilog mode from inside UltraEdit, in batch mode, to automatically generate port lists, etc. And I store commonly-used Verilog code snippets as UltraEdit templates.
Verilog (and VHDL) syntax coloring files are available on the UltraEdit web site. I also have a Xilinx UCF syntax coloring file; if anyone needs it, just send e-mail to bp cambriandesign com.
Are you saying you think Xilinx's tools are "Visual Studio"-like? I'll certainly agree that the Xilinx tools are poor at best, but I wouldn't say they are Studio-like. Coming from a command-line background, I've never been a big IDE fan. I tried to avoid them at all costs because they were big, clunky, and just got in the way of development. Then recently (last two years) I tried Visual Studio .NET for a software app I needed to write. Within a couple days I really learned to appreciate the package. It is very intelligently-designed. Function pop-ups to help remind you of the return type and parameters of a call are very helpful (I always used to have a window for editing and a window for 'man' pages side-by-side.).
Similarly, I recently started using Protel DXP for PCB work after having used OrCAD, Microsim, Eagle, Allegro, Mentor, and one or two others. Big difference. Someone actually took the time to design a piece of software that had function for the people who use it.
If Aldec can do the same, I'll switch. It's a shame Xilinx's tools couldn't be tweaked a bit better to accomplish similar goals. They're getting close to the level of integration they need. If they could combine Visual Studio's editing capabilities with Protel DXP's way of handling packages and projects, they would be well on their way. Currently, they provide nothing more than 'make' functionality with nothing near it's flexibility.
I have some experiance in developing with Visual Studio. It has reputation of "Visual Notepad". It is not a visual tool like for ex. Dephi. I with you to appretiate something IntelliJ Idea like. That is what I can call "intelligent". WebPack and VS are good editors for entering text and highlighting keywords. VS cannot exactly determine where function is declared, neither it can determine errorous line of code from linker. As well as WebPack doesn't.
Protel DXP is an impressive tool, Aldec is much more specific. However, I use WebPack due to its zero price. I would avoid Visual Studio as it is too big (3GB) and clunky notepad.
Interesting you wrote this, Valentin -- because I was revisiting VS.NET this morning trying to decide what features I liked. I bottom-lined it at the fact that I like the class method and parameter tooltips. I wished something were availble to me like that under Matlab and FPGA tools for functions and primitives.
Aside from that, I don't like the project organization nearly as much as I do under Protel DXP. I actually enjoy using the DXP GUI. I appreciate a low-price (free for WebPack) product, but I would certainly pay for a well-designed product that helps me get work done faster and doesn't force the tool to be in the way.
Matlab is an example of a good tool gone bad. They added this cheese-ball GUI interface and probably paid good money to develop it. It just contributed to the bloat of the package and their prices have skyrocketed ever since.
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