Notepad++ command line for Xilinx Vivado integration
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After searching on the internet for an hour, I finally came to the conclusion that while there are many entries for how to Xilinx’s Vivado FPGA development environment to use notepad++ as the default editor, every command line that I saw had some flaw in it. Even the default Xilinx Vivado command line got it wrong!!! I don’t know if notepad++ changed their command line option tags at some point or not, but this is what works with notepad++ in version 6.9 combined with Vivado 18.2 (if it matters).
I experimented for a while and came up with the following command line that works:
“c:/Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe” [file name] -n[line number]
The square bracketed text is Vivado’s internal keywords and the square brackets are required. Just copy and paste…
Obviously, you must correct any differences from my notepad++ executable and your notepad++ executable, so maybe not a total copy and paste.
The line number option is almost always incorrect in the other web pages that I found and notepad++ silently ignores an incorrect option from within Vivado. This command line will properly cause notepad++ to recognize that the file is verilog and scroll to the specified line number. No other internet suggestions that I found got this right for some reason.
The double quotes around the exe path may or may not be required. I am using them because of reports that a command line with the path doesn’t work in some of the Xilinx simulation tools. Xilinx recommends putting the notepad++ executable path in the PATH environment variable to overcome this problem, but I don’t like to use the PATH environment variable unless I have to because it can get out of date quickly across various upgrades, uninstalls, re-installs, etc.
The main limitation to notepad++ in this environment is that the Xilinx default editor supports verilog language syntax parsing and highlights lines that have syntax errors. I don’t see a way to preserve this capability. from within notepad++.
At any rate, I hope that this blog helps others to get notepad++ configured properly with Vivado as it is a great improvement over the default Xilinx text editor!
Don
