The official vIDE page at PUBRunning the simulation

You can run a simulation in two ways:

1 Running the simulation inside the IDE

After creating the project, you can start the simulator by clicking on the  button. This will first start the syntactic analyzer which will check the entire project and will print error messages as it finds anything wrong (for this implementation, only the first error is reported). You can go right to the place where the problem was found by clicking on the error message.

When everything is syntactically OK, the simulation gets started. By default, the interpreter enters into step-by-step mode, so only one instruction will be executed. You can use the toolbar buttons to execute the code or, alternatively, enter the commands by hand using the input line at the bottom of the window. You can find the available command list in the chapter Running the simulation from the command line.

All the messages generated by $display and other diagnose tasks are displayed into the console.

1.1 Using the watch

When running the simulation inside the IDE, you can browse the Watch window. It consists of a tree which contains all the module instances (and the enclosed namespaces, such as tasks, functions, named blocks, etc.) inside your project and their data with the actual values. The format is implicit the complete (sign, size, etc.) binary format.

1.2 Using the waveform viewer

The Waveform Viewer window can be activated by clicking the  button on the toolbar. You can add variables from the watch by clicking the desired name (it gets red) and clicking the "Add wave" button from the Watch Window.

2 Running the simulation from the command line

For long simulations where interactivity is not a must, this mode is recommended. The watch & runtime waveform viewing facilities are not available in this mode.

2.1 Invocation

The synopsis for the engine invocation is:

rv [-dhspl] [-o <precompiled_dir>[:<precompiled_dir>]] [--version] <verilog_files>

Options description:

2.2 Console commands

The console commands are: Note that the commands are matched by the first letters, and if the given ones do not uniquely identify a command, the first matched one is assumed (but we try to choose words which start with different letters, so only the initial should suffice in most cases :).