Text editor for VHDL on a Mac

Hello all,
I'm looking for a good text editor for VHDL code on Mac. Do you know one ?

regards

glias said:

Hello all,
I'm looking for a good text editor for VHDL code on Mac. Do you know one ?

regards

Click to expand...

Gedit and plugins

It looks like OSX has vim installed, or that you can get vim. You can probably get emacs as well. They both have suitable features for VHDL. Primarily, syntax highlighting, block-editing, and marker-based code folding. I haven't found any good intellitype solutions for VHDL/Verilog projects yet.

Syntax Highlighting has obvious benefits.

Block-editing is amazing because VHDL is a very verbose language with a very regular structure. If you take the small amount of time to keep things columnized, you end up being able to copy/paste/modify large blocks of code easily.

Marker-based code-folding is my personal favorite. It is an option in vim, and a plugin for emacs. It lets you add special strings like {{{ and }}} to define fold points in the design. I find that I often have one or two related processes, a process and an instance, or an instance and a few extra lines of assignments and that I want to treat these as a logical section of my code. I end up partitioning (all code lines are in a fold) my files. When I open a file, I basically get a table of contents and can quickly navigate the file.

Both editors do have learning curve though.

vim and emacs editors only is good if you want FYS.

I can't find a clear "FYS" meaning in this case. Either "first-year students" or "f yo self" were the top candidates. Though neither seem applicable.

Many of my coworkers have an adversion to vim/emacs though, and I certainly am always looking for better HDL tools. What features does gedit offer? Google isn't forthcoming about gedit/plugins must-have features. This is actually the first time I've heard of anyone using gedit for HDL development, so I am interested in an overview on what capabilities it has.

Hello,
Thanks for your replies...
I don't use VIM and Emacs, too difficult for me.
I just installed Gedit, the last version supports the VHDL/Verilog highlight, so it's perfect for me !

Thanks a lot for your help

I too use Emacs for VHDL editing and have spent much time trying to adapt it to my needs. Having the pleasure of having used Visual Studio as an IDE, I am always looking/expecting more from basic text editors such as Emacs/Vim/Eclipse-based for use as EDA tools. Anytime I hear someone bring up syntax highlighting as a compelling reason to use a certain text editor I start to cringe. Now-a-days its an embarrassment not to have syntax highlighting and should be considered 'standard issue'. Auto-completion, intelli-sense, refactoring, and easy project navigation are compelling reasons to use a text editor. Unfortunately these are not easy to come by. Emacs can be tweaked to almost-sort-of become this but not without a massive about of head-fucking first.

Anyway, as far as using Emacs to navigate source code files I have found etags/ctags to be quite helpful along with the speedbar for easier project navigation (if I can even call it that). For the tags its as simple as highlighting a word, hitting 'M-.', and going to the file where the function or entity or whatever you're looking for resides. The only downfall is that it works a certain percentage of the time as sometimes it takes you to the wrong place. Here are some instructions for setting up tags in Emacs, I suggest trying it out: https://www.coverfire.com/archives/2004/06/24/emacs-source-code-navigation/

I'll also have to try out the source code folding tip Permute suggested as that sounds like a nice feature to have. I too am always looking for better ways to do things so if anyone knows of or has found a nice tool for editing HDL code let us know. Recently there appear to be a handful of Eclipse-based options out there but I have yet to try them out. I have worked with Eclipse a bit and was pleasantly surprised at how easy things are to download and get set up, it looks promising.

Another a good editor is
https://www.sublimetext.com/2

You can use editors like : TextWrangler, Editra, gedit, TaterEdit, Bluefish....