This page describes how to enable Vala syntax highlighting and code browser support in GNU Emacs. vala-mode is based on csharp-mode.

Installation

If You have package.el (included in Emacs 24 by default) -- just use http://marmalade-repo.org/

• M-x package-install vala-mode

Ohterwise:

• Download vala-mode.el in your ~/.emacs.d/

• Add the following snippet to your ~/.emacs

  (add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d"))
  (autoload 'vala-mode "vala-mode" "Major mode for editing Vala code." t)
  (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.vala$" . vala-mode))
  (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.vapi$" . vala-mode))
  (add-to-list 'file-coding-system-alist '("\\.vala$" . utf-8))
  (add-to-list 'file-coding-system-alist '("\\.vapi$" . utf-8))

Code Browser

This is an optional configuration which is nice if you want to use Emacs Code Browser (ECB) and the CEDET package together with vala-mode. When you have successfully installed these packages as described on their homepages, you may use the C# semantics to get the wanted functionality also for Vala. It may not be perfect, but hopefully sufficient:

(add-hook 'vala-mode-hook #'wisent-csharp-default-setup)

Packages

This file is packaged in Debian GNU/Linux as vala-mode-el.

Lexical Scoping

A patch to change constructs like

   `(lambda (x) (foo x ',(f a b c)))

into closures like

   (let ((fabc (f a b c)))
     (lambda (x) (foo x facb)))

is available on the branch lexical in the repository git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/vala-mode-el.git