An Extensible User Interface for Lean 4

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