VHDE - a VHDL Diagram Editor that doesn’t suck

Introduction

With the VHDL Diagram Editor you can create hierarchical VHDL designs where
only the lowest level is written as text and the others are presented in a
diagram as graphical components that can be connected to each other. Each
diagram defines its inputs and outputs so it can be used as a component in
a higher level diagram.

Unique “selling” points

It is similar to Mentor Graphics’ HDL designer, but with the following
key improvements:

• it is Free Software
• all project files are text files
• the functional structure of the diagrams is stored in one set of files,
  while the layout information is stored in others.
• the file content is sorted/organized in such a way that it is easy to
  compare two versions of a file and see what was changed
• it does not integrate version control, but because it stores things in
  a version control friendly format, you can use any version control
  system you want
• it does not have an integrated editor for VHDL code, because existing
  editors are better than a custom one would ever be

Current status

There is a backlog that lists items to be done in order of
priority. If you have any additional items you would like to
see on this backlog or you have a comment on the chosen priorities, don’t
hesitate to contact me at griffon26@kfk4ever.com.

Currently when you select Open from the File menu, the application loads the
project defined in the test/exampleproject.vhde file. You can switch between
the entities and architectures in the project overview on the right, you can
interact with the diagram and optionally save your changes back to disk before
you close the application.

Dependencies

VHDE requires the following packages to be installed:

• cluttermm
• clutter-gtkmm
• gtkmm

If some of these packages or packages that they depend on are not available
through your distribution’s package manager, scripts are provided to make it
easy to install them in your home dir.