Graphical interface in GAP

Question

Is there any graphical interface in GAP? Something like RStudio for R or WxMaxima for Maxima. I'm using GAP under a Linux system. Thanks

Answer 1

There were several attempts, one started as Max Neunhöffer's GAP package XGAP which works only on Linux, others as external software (see at the bottom of Undeposited Implementations for GAP page). However, none of them is currently in the active development.

As @Bernard remarked above, one could use GAP via SageMath (careful about components and packages installed, that's not identical), and there is also a work in progress on a Jupyter kernel for GAP - when that will be ready, that would be the answer number one on this question.

Often the question is not really why one may be interested in a GUI for GAP, but which functionality could such a GUI add to GAP? One of the unique features of the XGAP package is its functionality to work with lattices of subgroups. Although GAP has DotFileLatticeSubgroups to export the lattice to GraphViz, with XGAP one could not only visualise them, but also explore interactively.

I would like to post here some screenshots (made on Ubuntu 14) to illustrate some of XGAP functionality. This is how the starting screen looks like:

After entering

GraphicSubgroupLattice( DihedralGroup(16) );

it opens new window. Diamonds correspond to normal subgroups, and conjugacy classes of subgroups correspond to circles grouped together. Right-click on a subgroup opens small pop-up window with its properties:

One could specify which subgroups to display and perform operations with one or several selected subgroups:

Also, one could control the layout of the lattice:

An interesting and useful project could be to reimplement this functionality using some more modern and cross-platform framework.