Let’s get to know the great things you can do with Gams-mode. In the previous post I showed how Gams-mode nicely colors your code, the syntax-highlighting. In this post we will look at the great way Gams-mode shows the results of your model run. This is done in the Gams-Outline mode.

First run your model by hitting C-c C-s (C stands for Ctrl) or use the same command from the menu. Emacs will open a new window and you see how Gams solves your model. When Gams is finished you can hit F10 (or C-c C-v)  to show the listing

I suppose you have installed emacs and gams-mode for emacs (if not see my preceding posts) and now are eager to start working on your model.

Let us start simple and get a model from the Gams-library. If you started emacs you are not in gams-mode (you can check this by looking at the menu bar: there is no gams-entry). If you load a gams model (with the extension “gms”), Emacs automatically turns on gams-mode and the gams entry appears in the menu bar (blue arrow). The first thing you probably notice is the syntax coloring. The coloring you will

After installing Emacs (see my previous post), the next thing to do is install gams-mode. If you got Emacs running, installing gams-mode is not so difficult.

First of all download gams-mode from Shiro Takeda’s website: You will find it here: gams-mode-download.

Update: you can now directly install gams-mode from the package repository:

There are quite a few ways to install Emacs on your Windows machine. On Linux it is rather easy: just use for example on Ubuntu your package manager. For the Mac you can have a look at Aquamacs, a version of Emacs that complies with the Human Interface Guidelines. More information on Aquamacs can be found at http://aquamacs.org/.

On Windows it is a different story. Emacs is coming from the Unix world and on Windows installing asks for a little bit more knowledge of Windows basics. You can’t for example install an additional feature (like Gams-mode for Emacs) by just

GAMS users probably spend most of their time editing their models. Just before project deadlines they may sit more than 8 hours a day in front of their computer hacking through their code. The choice of a good editor can therefore be crucial. After years of trying different editors I finally stuck (xxx) with the open-source editor Emacs.

For those of you who want to stop reading because they heard about the disadvantages of Emacs (“It has a steep learning curve”, “It is more a program for hackers” or “You have to learn all kind of key bindings by heart”),