Highlighting Objects

When you edit a design in the FPGA Editor, you may want to change the color of (highlight) one or more objects for easy reference. Highlighting is especially useful in dense designs.

You must select the automatic highlighting option in the main window property sheet. See the “Main Window Properties” section for more information. The automatic highlighting option determines whether objects are automatically highlighted. When the option is enabled, delay paths are highlighted after a delay command, and nets are highlighted after a manual route. By default, this option is disabled. You can also set highlighting from the Command Line toolbar. See the “Setattr” section of the “Command Line Syntax” chapter.

Here are some additional reasons for highlighting.

• Highlighting makes it easier to find objects in your design.
  
  
• After running a path delay, you may want to highlight the path you just checked.
  
  
• You may want to highlight the routes added during manual routing.
  
  

Before you can use the highlight feature, the layer containing the objects that you want to highlight must be selected in the Layer Visibility toolbar.

You can highlight selected objects in the following ways.

• Select Hilite in the User toolbar.
  
  
• Select View Highlight.
  
  
• Enter the Hilite command in the Command Line toolbar.
  
  

To change the color of a selected object to yellow, enter the following in the Command Line toolbar.

hilite -c yellow

See the “Hilite” section of the “Command Line Syntax” chapter for more information.

Selected objects are deselected based on the setting of the Automatic Deselect option in the Main Properties property sheet. If this option is not enabled, selected objects do not appear highlighted until you select another object. If this option is enabled, highlighted objects appear in the proper color automatically.