VHDL Editors (esp. V3S)

As X and A's integrated editors are more or less limited, I guess many peop le will looking for better alternatives.

The usual suspects will be Emacs (with VHDL mode) and Sigasi.

For me personally, I never really liked Emacs and found Sigasi just a bit t oo expensive.

So some time ago I came across V3S from

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It is a quite powerful and fair priced VHDL plug-in for Visual Studio (Stand-alone versi on with Visual Studio redistributable package also available). I could also watch the progress over the last few months and I really like it.

The only drawback is the missing Linux support. However, there appears to b e a Linux version of "Visual Studio Code". I have not checked yet if this w orks together with the plug-in. Maybe someone else has?

Regards,

Thomas

P.S.: I am in no way related to V3S, just a happy user. I want to sell you EEBlasters, JPEG encoders and cameras at

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howeve r ;-)

Reply to
thomas.entner99
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Try Eclipse. They cover a huge number of languages. A nice thing for me is that much of the UI is standard Eclipse, with nice extensions for language-awareness built in.

I'm currently using it for C/C++ development, html, and LaTeX -- and I have done Java with it in the past.

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Tim Wescott 
Wescott Design Services 
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

I suppose. What I remember of colleagues not using Emacs were using Ultraedit in Windows or Nedit in Linux.

Others have used something with no language support (KWrite in Linux, Sun's Textedit, also Windows Notepad, even "Edit" in MS-DOS.)

Reply to
Anssi Saari

But I think they do not go much beyond syntax highlighting for VHDL. Sigasi and V3S go much further, e.g. with automatic instance generation and "live" error checking.

@Tim: Do you have any specific Eclipse plug-ins in mind? I think they are all also just syntax highlighting. (For Verilog there is VEditor, but I think it has only limited VHDL support, too.) But it is some time ago since I checked last.

Reply to
thomas.entner99

I'm afraid I still use Codewright, which is a great tool still. But it's not under Linux. If I ever get a Linux computer up and running I keep saying I will switch to EMACS. But when I've looked at it under Windows it seems crude and complicated. I'm told once you get up the learning curve it is great, or grate.. pick one.

In Codewright I have several string recognizers to allow me to generate any one from any other, entity declaration, component instantiation, signals declarations. Not so much pain until I start altering them.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

On Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 7:36:46 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wro te:

ople will looking for better alternatives.

too expensive.

te powerful and fair priced VHDL plug-in for Visual Studio (Stand-alone ver sion with Visual Studio redistributable package also available). I could al so watch the progress over the last few months and I really like it.

be a Linux version of "Visual Studio Code". I have not checked yet if this works together with the plug-in. Maybe someone else has?

u EEBlasters, JPEG encoders and cameras at

formatting link
howe ver ;-)

As far as "editors" go, take your pick. I've used Emacs almost exclusively for ~15 years. Once you're proficient with something, it's difficult to s witch. I use it on Windows and Linux with no problems. It does take a whi le to set it up the way you like it, but once you learn the commands it's r eally nice.

Other editors used by my colleagues (some that I've tried) include: Vim, gV im, neoVim, Atom, Sublime Text, Notepad++, and SlickEdit.

One of the features I use a lot is Rectangle mode in Emacs.

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I haven't found a good, easy way to do the same thing in any of the other e ditors and that alone is a primary reason for sticking with Emacs.

Reply to
kkoorndyk

I know that Notepad++ (Windows) and Geany (my personal choice, cross-platform) both support column selection, which I think is pretty equivalent to Rectangle mode for most code sorts of tasks. They're both based around Scintilla as a backend; I'm assuming the support goes all the way back to that.

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Reply to
Rob Gaddi

The description of rectangle mode is a bit complex, how do you get an odd number of characters with an even number of lines? But Codewright has what I think that mode does. They call it block mode and you can cut, copy and paste any rectangular region to anywhere else.

I just realized that one of the "oddities" of Codewright has to do with the way they handle the blank spaces with no characters. If you position the cursor on a line where no chars are typed and type anything, it inserts spaces (or tabs and spaces) ahead of the cursor from the last char on the line. This would be important when using block mode in many instances. It's a bit of a pain in that moving the cursor down does not position at the end of the line, rather it just moves down one. You have to press the "end" key to go to the end of the line even when it is to the left. :(

--

Rick C
Reply to
rickman

I think most reasonable editors support this, mostly by either holding ALT or CTRL pressed during makeing a selection with the mouse-pointer. In Eclipse it is a seperate mode, toggled with ALT-SHIFT-A, IIRC.

BTW: I think most mentioned editors will be good for programming and editing, but for VHDL coding they cannot keep up with V3S or (the more expensive) Sigasi. Check out the videos on the respective home-pages...

Reply to
thomas.entner99

It's possible, I'm not sure if I've ever used Nedit or Ultraedit. But maybe the lack of features is the point? I feel at least some of those colleagues didn't want advanced features in their editor and I suppose also weren't bothered by the monkey work that means with VHDL.

I had a Sigasi evaluation license some years ago but in the end the problem was I don't really like Eclipse. I guess Sigasi is still Eclipse, right?

OTOH, I liked Sigasi's integration support for Quartus project files but that had more to do with Quartus's clunkiness.

Reply to
Anssi Saari

Yes, Sigasi is Eclipse based.

V3S is Visual Studio based.

Both approaches have their pros and cons. I guess it is - like the whole ed itor topic - a question of personal preferences. (I for my part e.g. do NOT like the "monkey work" and also like syntax errors to be flagged before co mpilation process, which is supported by both...)

Regards,

Thomas

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- Home of EEBlaster and JPEG-Codec

Reply to
thomas.entner99

I do almost all of my work in Verilog, but I do have comments about editors in general.

I gave up on using Xilinx built-in editors after the first major update. For no apparent reason, they completely changed the user interface. Im my opinion, the best editor is the one you're most familiar with. You spend a lot of time discovering the easiest way to do each editing task. So it makes no sense to depend on an editor that changes everything you've learned with each major software update.

I've been using Med for some time now. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, but I'm happy with the functionality of the old version I'm using. It didn't come with a Verilog language template, but gave me the option of making my own. It has some interesting capabilities like column-selection and paste being separate things. That is, regardless of how you copy or cut a piece of text, it can be pasted as a column (rectangular selection) or normally. So you can copy a rectangular selection and paste it in line, or vice versa. Indenting is rather crude, but good enough for my work.

I actually tried Sigasi's editor briefly, but found it lacking some of the features I was used to, and I wasn't so interested in the project management portion since I generally work from the Xilinx GUI. At this point, I'm not sure which feature I missed, since it's been a while since I tried it. What I was hoping to find (in any editor) was the ability to automatically re-indent code based on the language structure. This is something that has been in C editors for a long time. I seem to recall the operation called "prettify," as in to make the source look pretty. I like my code in a particular indenting style, and find it easier to read other peoples code after I've re-styled it to match my preferences.

--
Gabor
Reply to
GaborSzakacs

The last time I checked, both Sigasi and V3S had quite limited Verilog supp ort, I think in the moment they are really VHDL editors, with some basic Ve rilog support if you need to edit a Verilog file here and then...

I did a Verilog project only once, about 2 years ago, and at that time VEdi tor worked the best for me by far, at least from the free options (it was a lso recommended to me by the respective customer, but I first tried some di fferent approaches). It flagged a lot of issues in the source code that are not detected by a Verilog compiler and saved me a lot of time looking for stupid bugs. (In contrast, VHDL editors flag errors, that would be detected by the compiler... But this is a different topic ;-)

Regards,

Thomas

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- Home of EEBlaster and JPEG Codec

Reply to
thomas.entner99

I have installed V3S ...

When I instantiate a component in the following manner:

i_my: entity work.sub

V3S complains that sub is unknown ...

How can I suppress that behavior? (Ok, apart from using a component declaration...)

Noro

Reply to
noreeli.schmidt79

Am Donnerstag, 2. Februar 2017 09:36:34 UTC+1 schrieb snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

must be defined somewhere in the project (either another entity, or in a library/package) -> add that file to the project

Thomas

Reply to
thomas.entner99

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