Notepad++ is an excellent editor for coding VHDL

Hi,

In the working process for my private project, I use free Notepad++ to code VHDL code and appreciate it very much!

Here is an example of how powerful Notepad++ is:
In 27 files, I easily found that I use the statement  "when others => null; " 119 times and the statement "end case;" 117 times. There are certainly 2 mismatches for the 2 types of statements. I found only 1 mismatch in which "end case;" is written as "end if;" by looking at every statement  "when others => null; ", and abandoned another attempt to find the only mismatch. I don't have to switch files to locate the statement; instead, I just clicked a search result file shown in different colors.

 I would like to share this experience with everyone here.

Weng

On 2021-05-26, Tianxiang Weng <wtxwtx@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In the working process for my private project, I use free Notepad++ to code VHDL code and appreciate it very much!

Hi,
  how have you found Notepad++ when it comes to larger projects though?  The thing is it works fine when you have
  a small set of files, but any time you need more than that Notepad++ doesn't really scale.  In my case at the moment
  I need to work on a VHDL project stored in Git, but with many small files for Modelsim+Quartus and VS Code has
  been amazing for that.

> Here is an example of how powerful Notepad++ is:
> In 27 files, I easily found that I use the statement  "when others => null; " 119 times and the statement "end case;" 117 times. There are certainly 2 mismatches for the 2 types of statements. I found only 1 mismatch in which "end case;" is written as "end if;" by looking at every statement  "when others => null; ", and abandoned another attempt to find the only mismatch. I don't have to switch files to locate the statement; instead, I just clicked a search result file shown in different colors.
>

well you can do all that in IDEs like VS Code too, and the numerous extensions means you can do everything in one
IDE which is pretty nice.  Notepad++ really seems to be a useful halfway between Windows Notepad and VS Code.  Only
thing I hate about VS Code is there's a plethora of extensions that are all different but basically do the same things.
Just a look at VHDL, basically all of them are variations on syntax highlighting.
 
>
>  I would like to share this experience with everyone here.
>
> Weng
>