[Feature] Instance placement autocompletion

[pidgeon777]

I know that autocompletion is planned, my proposal is to add instance autocompletion.

For example, by typing the name of an entity that you want to instantiate, an autocomplete suggestion appears for that entity and selecting it would let you instantiate it as a snippet with placeholders (for example with VSCode format $1, $0). Pressing Tab \ Shift+Tab would let you place the cursor at the points where a keyword is needed. Example:

[kraigher]

Yes this is one of my goals with autocomplete.

[SethGower]

@pidgeon777 I don't know what editor you use (it kinda looks like (neo)vim. If so, you could checkout this extension as a temporary solution to this: https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3335

It lets you copy entity declarations and "paste" them as components/instances. I find it very helpful in my day to day, and have been using it for years. It's not the most polished, but it does the job (mostly. Has some bugs though).

[std-rubic]

A great feature, it seems to work with the https://github.com/VHDL-LS/rust_hdl/pull/244 Thanks a lot !!

[pidgeon777]

I have two proposal:

As you're aware, when defining generics and ports for a given entity in VHDL, they are arranged in an arbitrary order. For instance, the sequence might be generic1, generic2, port1, port2, port3, etc.

I propose that when entities are instantiated, the instantiated generics and ports should follow the same order as they were defined in their respective entities. So, autocomplete should output something as follows:

ENTITY_NAME: entity work.ENTITY_NAME
    generic map(
        generic1 => generic1,
        generic2 => generic2
    )
    port map(
        port1 => port1,
        port2 => port2,
        port3 => port3
    );

In the current implementation, it seems that the order is not preserved.

An entity may have multiple architectures. In this case, the autocomplete should provide a list of architectures to choose from, put inside parentheses. For example:

ENTITY_NAME: entity work.ENTITY_NAME(ARCHITECTURE_1|ARCHITECTURE_2|ARCHITECTURE_3)
    generic map(
        generic1 => generic1,
        generic2 => generic2
    )
    port map(
        port1 => port1,
        port2 => port2,
        port3 => port3
    );

If the instantiated entity has only one architecture, then the parentheses should not be included (which is the actual implementation):

ENTITY_NAME: entity work.ENTITY_NAME
    generic map(
        generic1 => generic1,
        generic2 => generic2
    )
    port map(
        port1 => port1,
        port2 => port2,
        port3 => port3
    );