Editing your FPGA source

I noted that in a recent poll of FPGA developers, emacs was far and away the most popular VHDL and Verilog editor. There are a few reasons for this – namely, emacs comes with packages for editing your HDL of choice. For those of us not wanting to install (and learn) the emacs operating system, I got Notepad++ to work with these packages.

Notepad++ already has VHDL and Verilog highlighting along with other advanced text editor features, but I wanted templates, automated declarations and beautification. To do this, he used the FingerText to store code as snippets and call them up at the wave of a finger.

As I writes his code, the component declarations constantly need to be updated, and with the help of a Perl script I can update them with the click of a hotkey. Beautification is a harder nut to crack, as Notepad++ doesn’t even have a VHDL or Verilog beautifier plugin. This was accomplished by installing emacs and running the beautification process as a batch script. Nobody can have it all, but we’re thinking that this method of getting away from emacs is pretty neat.

GNU Emacs - A Customizable Text Editor

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing. The features of GNU Emacs include:

Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML. Complete built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users. Full Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts. Highly customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface. A large number of extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more. Many of these extensions are distributed with GNU Emacs; others are available separately.

Emacs 23 has a wide variety of new features, including:

• Improved Unicode support.
• Font rendering with Fontconfig and Xft.
• Support for using X displays and text terminals in one session, and for running as a daemon.
• Support for multi-file commits in distributed version-control systems (VC-dir).
• New modes and packages for viewing PDF and postscript files (Doc-view mode), connecting to processes through D-Bus (dbus), connecting to the GNU Privacy Guard (EasyPG), editing XML documents (nXML mode), editing Ruby programs (Ruby mode), and more.

DOWNLOAD Emacs 23.3