When trying to set up common Neovim plugins for use with SystemVerilog, I discovered that there were very few examples of working configurations. in addition, many of the configuration examples provided by maintainers of plugins for SystemVerilog were often lacking documentation. Therefore, I wanted to share a small configuration based on my own to close the loop for future users like me.

To provide a minimum viable config as a point of reference for configuring an LSP, linter, and Treesitter plugin for use with SystemVerilog. It is not meant to replace your own configuration; only a point of reference.

example - Contains an example SystemVerilog project to test the config

lua - Contains the plugin specs and configurations for SystemVerilog. These files are called from within init.lua

init.lua - The entry point for all Neovim configuration

lazy-lock.json - Locks the various plugins at known-good versions that work together.

lazy.nvim - Plugin installation, configuration, and management

nvim-lspconfig - Configurations for the built-in LSP functionality

nvim-lint - provides linting for various filetypes

nvim-treesitter - Provides Treesitter interation for various filetypes

This configuration targets verilator for linting, and verible-verilog-ls as the language server. Other providers can be used, but are outside the scope of this project. You will need to make sure to have both verilator and verible-verilog-ls on your path. https://verilator.org/guide/latest/install.html

1. Clone the repo, making sure to not over write your Neovim config, for example: git clone [email protected]:thecooldaniel/nvim-config-systemverilog.git ~/.config/nvim-systemverilog
2. Launch Neovim, specifying the new config: NVIM_APPNAME=nvim-systemverilog nvim
3. lazy.nvim should be installed, an in turn it should install all the other plugins
4. Run :Lazy to verify. Press q to close the window.
5. IMPORTANT: Set the CWD of the editor/tab to the root of a SystemVerilog project. The root is defined as the directory from which verilator should be run
6. Open example\sim\tb_counter.sv, example\rtl\counter.sv, or example\rtl\include\packageExample.svh. Each of these files should contain warnings and/or errors.

• verilator needs to be given include directories explicitly when it is called; this is done similiar to GCC with syntax such as -Irtl. In this project, the include flags are present in example\verilator.f. For details, see lua\setup_systemverilog.lua.
• If you do not set the CWD of the editor/tab, linting will not work.
• Syntax highlighting provided via nvim-tressitter can be hit or miss. See lua\setup_systemverilog.lua on how to disable it.
• While the linter is configured to fire on several Neovim events, it only reliably fires on file save.

• :LspConfig should show verible attached to at least one open *.sv/*.svh buffer
• :InspectTree should spawn a window with the tree structure generated by Treesitter. You might get Lua errors on first run.
• :lua =require(lint).linters.verilator will show you all of the arguments passed to verilator when linting. The last argument should be a path; if the argument list ends with -f then vim.fs.find cannot locate verilator.f

• Ensure you have set the CWD. See above.
• Ensure you have either set include flags in the argument sent to verilator in lua\setup_systemverilog.lua, or in verilator.f.
• If the include flags are present, make sure they are either absolute, or relative to the current CWD.

• Save the buffer with :w

• This is most likely caused by an error/warning present in an imported package.

• trouble.nvim
• mason.nvim (Not used in this project because it only supports the verible-verilog-xxxx binaries for all functionality, including linting.)