Helpful GAP interface programs

GAP has excellent command line features, such as help. Moreover, GAP will remember your session "history" (all the commands typed in during your GAP session) and allow you to find all previously issued commands starting with a specific letter or sequence. For example, aBcD by typing

gap> aBcD

Other "interface" options exist and this page explains some of these.

• For xemacs/emacs lovers, there is a special mode for GAP users (for vim users, see the section Editor Support in the GAP reference manual). Note that by running GAP within emacs/xemacs you will lose, for example, the tab-completion and the nice history features of GAP's built-in shell. However, as a small consolation, you can edit out any syntax mistakes in your session as you go. The page GAP in emacs or xemacs has infomation for GAP in linux and GAP in windows.


• GAP does not allow more than one line of comments using the usual "Read" command. For debugging and for adding examples to help remember proper syntax, multi-line comments would be very useful. Thanks to a new command "ReadNC" written by Frank Luebeck, you now can include multi-line comments into your file. Frank Luebeck's ReadNC GAP program allows the reading into GAP of programs with multi-line comments.