TextMate Lacks A VHDL Bundle

TextMateI am relatively new to TextMate, having been converted from Emacs less than a year ago. Emacs (pictured below) has extensive support for coding in VHDL. I was quite surprised, then, when I learned that there is no VHDL bundle available for TextMate. It turns out that both VHDL and Verilog (the two most popular hardware description languages) are on the bundle request list.

Editing VHDL in Emacs

When I think about this more, it makes sense. The Macintosh is not the platform of choice for hardware designers, who are probably using UNIX or Linux. The VHDL simulation software that we use in school only runs on Windows, but there are some command-line simulation tools such as GHDL that have been ported to run on Mac OS X.

I’m considering writing my own bundle, which would be a good excuse to buy that new TextMate book that I’ve been wanting. Syntax highlighting and commonly used snippets/declarations would be the main priority, followed in the future by GHDL integration. Of course, I would add the bundle to the Macromates SVN repository once it was in a useful state.

If you got here from Google, what functionality would you like to see in a TextMate VHDL bundle?

8 Responses to “TextMate Lacks A VHDL Bundle”


  1. 1 jhg

    A highlighting scheme similar to the Notepad vhdl style would be nice. I find it more tolerable than Xilinx’s default highlighting in ISE.

    A distant tie for second would be structure collapsing and auto-indentation for nesting.

    Cheers,
    Joe

  2. 2 jhg

    Alas, the parser stripped out the plus signs from Notepad plus plus in the above comment.

    Here is the link to what I’m talking about:
    http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

  3. 3 Brian

    Something that Textmate is all about is to help with standard function calls or creating templates. I am not sure of the limitations of Textmate as I haven’t looked into creating my own VHDL bundle, but it would be nice to be able to do some sort of component completion when instantiating new modules or components along with entity/architecture/component/package/etc creation.

    Good luck with the bundle! I sure would appreciate it. Though most of the tools I currently use are Windows based, I’d still like to do my editing in Textmate and possibly use Parallels for running the Windows simulator and synthesizer.

  4. 4 Bug

    How’s it going? I’m in the same boat as Brian, although I would be happy with just the syntax module (highlighting block folding, maybe indenting). Add snippets if you have the time. Otherwise, I might! :)

  5. 5 Brian

    I took a stab at creating a VHDL bundle. It currently does some snippets I find useful, some decent code folding, basic indenting, highlighting for all the different standard packages and functions, etc, etc.

    I put a zip of it here:

    http://lebowski.eatcheese.biz/~bpadalino/textmate/VHDL.tmbundle.zip

    I am in the process of getting it added to their repository, and in the GetBundle bundle. Feedback is appreciated and there is contact info if you go to edit the bundle language.

  6. 6 Jason

    I would like to see commenting/uncommenting such as the alt-c and shift-alt-c behavior in the ISE editor.

  7. 7 mpare

    Man I would just love to see a bundle period, integration with Icarus would be cool. I just don’t have time to write a bundle with school, especially as I have never done so and would have to learn how. I’m going to try the one on Labowski.eatcheese.biz for now.

    Cheers,
    -mpare

  8. 8 kevin

    i’m using verilog for a class right now and dying for a textmate bundle.

    since Xcode keeps crashing on my machine (as it’s done since I upgraded to leopard), i’m stuck in vim in a terminal. it’s got syntax highlighting, but vims a pain.

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