SVEditor - A SystemVerilog Editor Eclipse Plugin

Source code editors have features specifically designed to simplify and speed up input of source code, such as syntax highlighting, indentation, autocomplete and bracket matching functionality. Variety of source code editors are available for VLDH, Verilog & SystemVerilog. We have already posted feb of them like Scriptum, and Emacs. 

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Scriptum - Free VHDL and Verilog Text Editor 

GNU Emacs - A Customizable Text Editor

SVEditor is an Eclipse-based IDE (integrated development environment) for SystemVerilog and Verilog development. It provides a colourising editor for SystemVerilog with support for source navigation, content assist, source indent and auto-indent, SystemVerilog source templates and context-sensitive viewing of source documentation. Users have praised SVEditor for some of its features, such as searching for a colourisation of SystemVerilog keywords or words in a directory, auto-completion and some content assist. We believe that you can use SVEditor for debugging if you love emacs. Quoting from sourceforge.net, one user has said, “I’m totally stoked that this project is under active development. The tool is already very useful.

SVEditor provides a variety of features to make developing designs and testbench environments in SystemVerilog simpler and more efficient.

Features at a glance

The application uses a scanner that is similar to ctags for extracting the information from SystemVerilog and Verilog source files. It is engineered to be tolerant of errors, as well as to ignore unrecognized language constructs.

Among some of SVEditor’s features, we can mention colorizing for SystemVerilog keywords, outline view linked with editor, file structure view, SystemVerilog source index, syntax coloring editor, content assist, and cross-linking between data structure usage and declaration.

There are multiple ways to install the SVEditor software on your GNU/Linux computer, considering the fact that we’ve already installed the latest JRE (Java Runtime Environment) and Eclipse IDE software.

For exemple, you can download the latest version of the project as a JAR archive that can be opened into an existing Eclipse environment, you can search the application in the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution, or compile it yourself using the source package provided right here on Softpedia.

For more details, do not hesitate to check out the project’s website.

Supported operating systems:

Taking a look under the hood of the SVEditor application, we can notice that it has been written entirely in the Java programming language and integrates with the Eclipse IDE for its graphical user interface.

If you don't have Eclipse IDE installed then here is link to download page of Eclipse IDE. Download Eclipse IDE

Being written in Java, SVEditor is a cross-platform software that runs on all operating ssytems where the Java Runtime Environment and Eclipse IDE are available, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It has been successfully tested on computers supporting either of the 64-bit (x86_64) or 32-bit (x86) CPU architectures.

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.