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1.5 What Gmsh is pretty good at …
Here is a tentative list of what Gmsh does best:
- quickly describe simple and/or “repetitive” geometries, thanks to user-defined functions, loops, conditionals and includes (see User-defined functions, Loops and conditionals, and General commands);
- parametrize these geometries. Gmsh’s scripting language enables all commands and command arguments to depend on previous calculations (see Expressions, and Geometry commands);
- generate 1D, 2D and 3D simplicial (i.e., using line segments, triangles and tetrahedra) finite element meshes for CAD models in their native format (without translations) when linked with the appropriate CAD kernel (see Mesh module);
- specify target element sizes accurately. Gmsh provides several mechanisms to control the size of the elements in the final mesh: through interpolation from sizes specified at geometry points or using flexible mesh size fields (see section Mesh commands);
- create simple extruded geometries and meshes (see Geometry commands, and Mesh commands);
- interact with external solvers through a simple client-server architecture (see section Solver module);
- visualize and export computational results in a great variety of ways. Gmsh can display scalar, vector and tensor datasets, perform various operations on the resulting post-processing views (see section Post-processing module), can export plots in many different formats (see section General options list), and can generate complex animations (see General tools, and ‘t8.geo’);
- run on low end machines and/or machines with no graphical interface. Gmsh can be compiled with or without the GUI (see section Compiling the source code), and all versions can be used either interactively or directly from the command line (see section Running Gmsh on your system);
- configure your preferred options. Gmsh has a large number of configuration options that can be set interactively using the GUI, scattered inside command files, changed on the fly in scripts, set in per-user configuration files, or specified on the command-line (see Running Gmsh on your system and Options);
- and do all the above on various platforms (Windows, Mac and Unix), for free (see section Copying conditions), using simple script files and/or a small but powerful GUI.
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