Abstract

Contemporary proof assistants rely on complex automation and process libraries with millions of lines of code. At these scales, understanding the emergent interactions between components can be a serious challenge. One way of managing complexity, long established in informal practice, is through varying external representations. For instance, algebraic notation facilitates term-based reasoning whereas geometric diagrams invoke spatial intuition. Objects viewed one way become much simpler than when viewed differently. In contrast, modern general-purpose ITP systems usually only support limited, textual representations. Treating this as a problem of human-computer interaction, we aim to demonstrate that presentations - UI elements that store references to the objects they are displaying - are a fruitful way of thinking about ITP interface design. They allow us to make headway on two fronts - introspection of prover internals and support for diagrammatic reasoning. To this end we have built an extensible user interface for the Lean 4 prover with an associated ProofWidgets 4 library of presentation-based UI components. We demonstrate the system with several examples including type information popups, structured traces, contextual suggestions, a display for algebraic reasoning, and visualizations of red-black trees. Our interface is already part of the core Lean distribution.

@InProceedings{nawrocki_et_al:LIPIcs.ITP.2023.24,
  author =	{Nawrocki, Wojciech and Ayers, Edward W. and Ebner, Gabriel},
  title =	{{An Extensible User Interface for Lean 4}},
  booktitle =	{14th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2023)},
  pages =	{24:1--24:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-284-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{268},
  editor =	{Naumowicz, Adam and Thiemann, Ren\'{e}},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2023/18399},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-183991},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITP.2023.24},
  annote =	{Keywords: user interfaces, human-computer interaction, Lean}
}