Key shortcut reminder popups in Eclipse

May 14, 2010, 1:36 am

≫ Next: Sigasi's VHDL Eclipse plugin ready for new Eclipse 3.6 (Helios)

Using keyboard shortcuts makes you a lot more efficient compared to using your mouse. But how to learn all shortcuts in an unobstructive and efficient way?

The users of our standalone VHDL development environment have certainly noticed the subtle popups with the keyboard shortcut, every time you click a button or menu item. This effect is achieved through the MouseFeed plugin. MouseFeed helps you to form the good habit of using keyboard shortcuts.

How can you enable this feature if you are using a standard Eclipse distribution? You just have to install the MouseFeed plugin.

MouseFeed popup for Open Declaration

Installation

Click Help > Install New Software...
Enter http://update.mousefeed.com in the Work with field and press Enter
Some plugins should appear
Select MouseFeed 1.0.0
Click Next (2 times), accept the license and click finish.
Restart Eclipse

Note

For die hard keyboard fetishists, MouseFeed offers an interesting option in its preference page to enforce the use of keyboard shortcuts (Preferences > Mousefeed > Action invocation). If you enable this preference, every time you try to start an action with your mouse that has has a keyboard shortcut, the action will not be executed; instead the popup will show you the shortcut. This way you are forced to learn and use the shortcut.

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Sigasi's VHDL Eclipse plugin ready for new Eclipse 3.6 (Helios)

June 28, 2010, 1:32 am

≫ Next: Summertime: trial period doubled

≪ Previous: Key shortcut reminder popups in Eclipse

Last week the Eclipse Foundation released a new version of Eclipse, called Helios. The Sigasi team was prepared for this release, and included the necessary changes in last month's release.

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Summertime: trial period doubled

July 9, 2010, 12:45 am

≫ Next: Organizing legacy projects

≪ Previous: Sigasi's VHDL Eclipse plugin ready for new Eclipse 3.6 (Helios)

It's summertime and things in this part of the world are slowing down. This is an excellent time to try out some new tooling.

We are taking a closer look at Git, Scala and some other cool stuff.

At the same time, we have extended our trial period from 2 weeks to 4 weeks. Existing users who´s license has expired can request a new evaluation license. If you are new to Sigasi, you can subscribe for a free trial and take an entire month to see how Sigasi HDT works on your VHDL project. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

-- Philippe

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Organizing legacy projects

August 15, 2010, 10:38 am

≫ Next: Performance improvements

≪ Previous: Summertime: trial period doubled

Note This article was originally written for Sigasi 1.0. The general concepts still apply, but you will need to change some details. Let us know if you need more help with this.

This post explains how to import legacy projects into Sigasi HDT.

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Performance improvements

October 15, 2010, 7:17 am

≫ Next: Even more performance improvements

≪ Previous: Organizing legacy projects

For the upcoming release of Sigasi's VHDL Eclipse plugin, we have reviewed the performance of our product for some very big VHDL projects. Before I talk about the performance improvements, I will first explain a few things about the build system. When you open a VHDL project, our plugin starts compiling all VHDL files in your project in the background. When the full build is completed, the advanced features of Sigasi HDT are activated such as VHDL refactoring support, hierarchy views and semantic code highlighting. This full build is only needed when Sigasi HDT is started.

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Even more performance improvements

October 22, 2010, 2:42 am

≫ Next: Use Sigasi HDT as default VHDL editor in Xilinx ISE

≪ Previous: Performance improvements

In our latest release we focussed development on improving the performance of our VHDL compiler so that Sigasi HDT can give faster feedback. We optimized VHDL analysis so that both the full build and incremental builds are much faster.

We also added another improvement to Sigasi HDT that we did not communicate about yet. In the latest download of the stand-alone application, we also updated the JRE, the Java Runtime Environment to version 1.6.0_22. The JRE is the engine that runs Sigasi HDT (and Eclipse). So every performance improvement to the JRE also speeds up Sigasi HDT.

If you downloaded after 2010-10-20, you already have an updated JRE. But if you have been using Sigasi HDT for a longer time, you will have to update the JRE manually, since our embedded update mechanism unfortunately cannot automatically update the JRE.

How to update the JRE

If you are running the stand-alone version, you need to download the latest version and completly replace your existing installation. You will not loose any settings because all your settings are stored in your workspace (workspace-sigasi). The best approach is to:

Download the latest version
Move your existing installation to your trash bin
Unzip the Sigasi HDT zip file

If you are running Sigasi HDT as Eclipse VHDL plugin, you have already installed Java yourself anyhow. The easiest was to update is to use your OS's update mechanism.

Enjoy your faster VHDL design experience,
Hendrik.

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Use Sigasi HDT as default VHDL editor in Xilinx ISE

January 28, 2011, 8:56 am

≫ Next: Tricking your Mac in to Believing it can run ModelSim

≪ Previous: Even more performance improvements

Since the latest release of Sigasi HDT it is possible to open VHDL files from the command line. This enables you to more easily use Sigasi HDT's superior VHDL editing functionally in combination with tools like Xilinx ISE.

How to configure Sigasi HDT as default VHDL editor in Xilinx ISE?

Click Edit > Preferences and ISE General > Editors
Select Custom instead of ISE Text Editor

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Tricking your Mac in to Believing it can run ModelSim

July 28, 2011, 5:56 am

≫ Next: Sigasi Standalone on Ubuntu 11.04 and later

≪ Previous: Use Sigasi HDT as default VHDL editor in Xilinx ISE

Disclaimer 1: This is in no way a crack; we're not messing with ModelSim! You'll need a legal copy and a valid license, which you can get from your Mentor Graphics sales rep, or (a limited version, free of charge) from the Altera website

Disclaimer 2: Consider this semi-advanced stuff.

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Sigasi Standalone on Ubuntu 11.04 and later

November 9, 2011, 5:38 am

≫ Next: Eclipse TCL support in Sigasi

≪ Previous: Tricking your Mac in to Believing it can run ModelSim

A user reported that he had problems with Sigasi 2 on the latest versions of Ubuntu. Most menu items were missing and the menu bar did not appear.
It turns out this is an issue with the unity menu.

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Eclipse TCL support in Sigasi

September 17, 2012, 1:36 am

≫ Next: Sigasi HDT with the new Xilinx ISE 12 (updated)

≪ Previous: Sigasi Standalone on Ubuntu 11.04 and later

Tcl is the de facto standard for scripting in EDA software. So every hardware designer has to deal with Tcl. Luckily for us there is an Eclipse Tcl plugin available that can help us read and write Tcl code. This plugin offers open declaration, (quick) outline, autocomplete, debugging and other features that will make you more productive.

h2.

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Sigasi HDT with the new Xilinx ISE 12 (updated)

May 5, 2010, 1:49 am

≫ Next: Free VHDL plugin for Eclipse?

≪ Previous: Eclipse TCL support in Sigasi

Update: Sigasi HDT has been updated to support Xilinx ISE 12 without modifications: release notes

Xilinx just released a new version of Xilinx ISE Suite.

Because the internal directory structure of this new version 12 has changed with respect to version 11, the integration with Sigasi HDT does not work as expected. Version 12 has an extra top-level directory ISE_DS which confuses Sigasi HDT.

It is however possible to configure Sigasi HDT to use ISim version 12.1 with this workaround:

In Preferences > Xilinx, specify:

Windows:

c:\Xilinx\12.1\ISE_DS

instead of just c:\Xilinx\12.1.

Linux:

/opt/Xilinx/12.1/ISE_DS/

instead of just /opt/Xilinx/12.1/.

In the next release of Sigasi HDT, we will make sure the configuration of the Xilinx path is the same for all versions.

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Free VHDL plugin for Eclipse?

April 6, 2010, 5:00 am

≪ Previous: Sigasi HDT with the new Xilinx ISE 12 (updated)

Last month, we released our VHDL IDE as an Eclipse VHDL plugin. Before that, it was only available as a standalone product. There were two main reasons for releasing the VHDL Eclipse plugin version. First, many users requested features that we would never implement, such as support for C, PHP or ClearCase. Of course, we could integrate existing Eclipse plugins, but we did not want to overload our standalone product.

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