2. Getting Connected

VHDL Mode works well under FSF Emacs 20 and XEmacs 19.15 and higher. FSF Emacs 19 is not supported anymore since several new features of Emacs 20 are used in this VHDL Mode version (you can download VHDL Mode version 1.10 for Emacs 19). Also, Win-Emacs is currently not supported, simply because I am not able to test and maintain the code on this platform.

The first thing you will want to do is put `vhdl-mode.el' somewhere on your load-path so Emacs can find it. Do a C-h v load-path RET to see all the directories Emacs looks at when loading a file. If none of these directories are appropriate, create a new directory and add it to your load-path:

[in the shell]

% cd
% mkdir mylisp
% mv vhdl-mode.el mylisp
% cd mylisp

[in your .emacs file add]

(setq load-path (cons "~/mylisp" load-path))

Next you want to byte compile `vhdl-mode.el'. The mode uses a lot of macros so if you don't byte compile it, things will be unbearably slow. You can ignore all byte-compiler warnings! They are the result of the supporting different versions of Emacs, and none of the warnings have any effect on operation. Let me say this again: You really can ignore all byte-compiler warnings!

Here's what to do to byte-compile the file [in emacs]:

M-x byte-compile-file RET ~/mylisp/vhdl-mode.el RET

Now add the following autoloads to your `.emacs' file so that vhdl-mode gets loaded at the right time:

(autoload 'vhdl-mode "vhdl-mode" "VHDL Editing Mode" t)

Alternatively, if you want to make sure VHDL Mode is loaded when Emacs starts up, you could use this line instead of the autoload above:

(require 'vhdl-mode)

Next, you will want to set up Emacs so that it edits VHDL files in VHDL Mode. All users should add the following to their `.emacs' file. Note that this assumes you'll be editing .vhd and files as VHDL. YMMV:

(setq auto-mode-alist
  (append
    '(("\\.vhd$" . vhdl-mode)
     ) auto-mode-alist))

That's all you need -- I know, I know, it sounds like a lot :-), but after you've done all this, you should only need to quit and restart Emacs. The next time you visit a VHDL file you should be using VHDL Mode. You can check this easily by hitting M-x vhdl-version RET in the VHDL Mode buffer. You should see this message in the echo area:

Using VHDL Mode version 3.XX

where XX will be some minor revision number.

This document was generated by XEmacs shared group account on December, 19 2009 using texi2html 1.65.