Engineers working on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) projects and looking for a friendly development environment to add to their toolchain now have a new option: the VerilogCreator plugin for QtCreator.

Written by Rochus Keller and brought to our attention by Hackaday, VerilogCreator is designed to turn the QtCreator integrated development environment (IDE) into one suitable for working on Verilog 2005 projects, complete with syntax highlighting, code warnings and errors, jump-to drop-down options, code folding, and the ability to directly run compilers and simulators within QtCreator or to generate command files for Verilator and Yosys.

“The plugin is still work in progress, but it already has enough functionality to analyse existing code bases or to develop new code,” Rochus explains of his project. “The current version supports Verilog 2005 syntax checking/colouring and semantic code navigation/highlighting; there are build configurations for Icarus, Verilator, Yosys and Tcl. Projects can be configured using a file format similar to qmake.

“Even though I’m using Qt for twenty years and QtCreator for ten years this is my first noteworthy QtCreator plugin,” Rochus continues, explaining that issues surrounding poor quality and outdated documentation made the process considerably more difficult than expected. “All in all it is now clear to me why there are comparatively few plugins for QtCreator in all these years and most of them come directly from the Qt Company,” he adds in explanation for why the plugin only supports QtCreator 3 and not QtCreator 4. “Source and binary compatibility between QtCreator versions is not only complex, but a full-blown nightmare.”

The full plugin, which is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence, is available on GitHub.