Coq LSP 
coq-lsp is a Language Server and Visual Studio Code extension for the Coq Proof Assistant. Experimental support for Vim and Neovim is also available in their own projects.
Quick Install:
$ opam install coq-lsp && code --install-extension ejgallego.coq-lsp
Key features of coq-lsp are: continuous and incremental document checking, advanced error recovery, hybrid Coq/markdown document support, multiple workspace support, positional goals and information panel, performance data, extensible command-line compiler, plugin system, and more.
See the coq-lsp User Manual for more information.
coq-lsp aims to provide a seamless, modern interactive theorem proving experience, as well as to serve as a maintainable platform for research and UI integration with other projects.
coq-lsp is built on top of Flèche, a new document checking engine for formal documents, designed from our experience in previous, projects. Flèche is specifically optimized for interactive use, SerAPI-like tooling integration, and web native usage, providing quite a few extra features from vanilla Coq.
coq-lsp supports 🐧 Linux, 🍎 macOS, 🪟 Windows , and ☕ JavaScript (Node/Browser)
Table of Contents
🎁 Features
⏩ Incremental Compilation and Continuous Document Checking
Edit your file, and coq-lsp will try to re-check only what is necessary, continuously. No more dreaded Ctrl-C Ctrl-N! Rechecking tries to be smart, and will ignore whitespace changes.
In a future release, coq-lsp will save its document cache to disk, so you can restart your proof session where you left it at the last time.
Incremental support is undergoing refinement, if coq-lsp rechecks when it should not, please file a bug!
👁 On-demand, Follow The Viewport Document Checking
coq-lsp does also support on-demand checking. Two modes are available: follow the cursor, or follow the viewport; the modes can be toggled using the Language Status Item in Code's bottom right corner:
🧠 Smart, Cache-Aware Error Recovery
coq-lsp won't stop checking on errors, but supports (and encourages) working with proof documents that are only partially working. Error recovery integrates with the incremental cache, and does recognize proof structure.
You can edit without fear inside a Proof. ... Qed., the rest of the document won't be rechecked; you can leave bullets and focused goals unfinished, and coq-lsp will automatically admit them for you.
If a lemma is not completed, coq-lsp will admit it automatically. No more Admitted / Qed churn!
🥅 Whole-Document Goal Display
coq-lsp will follow the cursor movement and show underlying goals and messages; as well as information about what goals you have given up, shelves, pending obligations, open bullets and their goals.
Goal display behavior is configurable in case you'd like to trigger goal display more conservatively.
🗒️ Markdown and LaTeX Support
Open a markdown file with a .mv extension, or a TeX file ending in .lv or .v.tex, then coq-lsp will check the code parts that are enclosed into coq language blocks! coq-lsp places human-friendly documents at the core of its design ideas.
Moreover, you can use the usual Visual Studio Code Markdown or LaTeX preview facilities to render your markdown documents nicely!
👥 Document Outline
coq-lsp supports document outline and code folding, allowing you to jump directly to definitions in the document. Many of the Coq vernacular commands like Definition, Theorem, Lemma, etc. will be recognized as document symbols which you can navigate to or see the outline of.
🐝 Document Hover
Hovering over a Coq identifier will show its type.
Hover is also used to get debug information, which can be enabled in the preferences panel.
📁 Multiple Workspaces
coq-lsp supports projects with multiple _CoqProject files, use the "Add folder to Workspace" feature of Visual Studio code or the LSP Workspace Folders extension to use this in your project.
💾 .vo file saving
coq-lsp can save a .vo file of the current document as soon as it the checking has been completed, using the command Coq LSP: Save file to .vo.
You can configure coq-lsp in settings to do this every time you save your .vo file, but this can be costly so we ship it disabled by default.
⏱️ Detailed Timing and Memory Statistics
Hover over any Coq sentence, coq-lsp will display detailed memory and timing statistics.
🔧 Client-Side Configuration Options
coq-lsp is configurable, and tries to adapt to your own workflow. What to do when a proof doesn't check, admit or ignore? You decide!
See the coq-lsp extension configuration in VSCode for options available.
🖵 Extensible, Machine-friendly Command Line Compiler
coq-lsp includes the fcc "Flèche Coq Compiler" which allows the access to almost all the features of Flèche / coq-lsp without the need to spawn a fully-fledged LSP client.
fcc has been designed to be machine-friendly and extensible, so you can easily add your pre/post processing passes, for example to analyze or serialize parts of Coq files.
🪄 Advanced APIs for Coq Interaction
Thanks to Flèche, we provide some APIs on top of it that allow advanced use cases with Coq. In particular, we provide direct, low-overhead access to Coq's proof engine using petanque.
♻️ Reusability, Standards, Modularity
The incremental document checking library of coq-lsp has been designed to be reusable by other projects written in OCaml and with needs for document validation UI, as well as by other Coq projects such as jsCoq.
Moreover, we are strongly based on standards, aiming for the least possible extensions.
🌐 Web Native!
coq-lsp has been designed from the ground up to fully run inside your web browser seamlessly; our sister project, jsCoq has been already been experimentally ported to coq-lsp, and future releases will use it by default.
coq-lsp provides an exciting new array of opportunities for jsCoq, lifting some limitations we inherited from Coq's lack of web native support.
A key coq-lsp goal is to serve as central platform for researchers in Human-Computer-Interaction, Machine Learning, and Software Engineering willing to interact with Coq.
Towards this goal, coq-lsp extends and is in the process of replacing Coq SerAPI, which has been used by many to that purpose.
If you are a SerAPI user, please see our preliminary migrating from SerAPI document.
🛠️ Installation
In order to use coq-lsp you'll need to install both coq-lsp and a suitable LSP client that understands coq-lsp extensions. The recommended client is the Visual Studio Code Extension, but we aim to fully support other clients officially and will do so once their authors consider them ready.
🏘️ Supported Coq Versions
coq-lsp supports Coq 8.20, Coq 8.19, Coq 8.18, Coq 8.17, and Coq's master branch. Code for each Coq version can be found in the corresponding branch.
We recommended using Coq 8.19 or master version. For other Coq versions, we recommend users to install the custom Coq tree as detailed in Coq Upstream Bugs.
Note that this section covers user installs, if you would like to contribute to coq-lsp and build a development version, please check our contributing guide
🏓 Server
opam (OSX/Linux):
opam install coq-lsp
Nix:
- In nixpkgs: coqPackages.coq-lsp
- The
coq-lsp server is automatically put in scope when running nix-shell in a project using the Coq Nix Toolbox (added to the toolbox Oct 10th 2023). - An example of a
flake that uses coq-lsp in a development environment is here https://github.com/HoTT/Coq-HoTT/blob/master/flake.nix .
Windows: Experimental Windows installers based on the Coq Platform are available at https://www.irif.fr/~gallego/coq-lsp/
This provides a Windows native binary that can be executed from VSCode normally. As of today a bit of configuration is still needed:
In VSCode, set the Coq-lsp: Path to:
C:\Coq-Platform~8.20-lsp\bin\coq-lsp.exe
In VSCode, set the Coq-lsp: Args to:
--coqlib=C:\Coq-Platform~8.20-lsp\lib\coq\--coqcorelib=C:\Coq-Platform~8.20-lsp\lib\coq-core\--ocamlpath=C:\Coq-Platform~8.20-lsp\lib\
- Replace
C:\Coq-Platform~8.20-lsp\ by the path you have installed Coq above as needed - Note that the installers are unsigned (for now), so you'll have to click on "More info" then "Run anyway" inside the "Windows Protected your PC" dialog
- Also note that the installers are work in progress, and may change often.
- Do it yourself! Compilation from sources
🫐 Visual Studio Code
- Official Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ejgallego.coq-lsp
- Open VSX: https://open-vsx.org/extension/ejgallego/coq-lsp
🦄 Emacs
- An experimental configuration for
lsp-mode has been provided by Arthur Azevedo de Amorim, supporting goal display, see the Zulip thread for more information.
✅ Vim
🩱 Neovim
- Experimental client by Jaehwang Jung: https://github.com/tomtomjhj/coq-lsp.nvim
🐍 Python
- Interact programmatically with Coq files by using the Coqpyt by Pedro Carrott and Nuno Saavedra.
⇨ coq-lsp users and extensions
The below projects are using coq-lsp, we recommend you try them!
🗣️ Discussion Channel
coq-lsp discussion channel it at Coq's Zulip, don't hesitate to stop by; both users and developers are welcome.
☎ Weekly Calls
We hold (almost) weekly video conference calls, see the Call Schedule Page for more information. Everyone is most welcome!
❓FAQ
See our list of frequently-asked questions.
⁉️ Troubleshooting and Known Problems
Coq upstream bugs
Unfortunately Coq releases contain bugs that affect coq-lsp. We strongly recommend that if you are installing via opam, you use the following branches that have some fixes backported:
- For 8.20: No known problems
- For 8.19:
opam pin add coq-core https://github.com/ejgallego/coq.git#v8.19+lsp - For 8.18:
opam pin add coq-core https://github.com/ejgallego/coq.git#v8.18+lsp - For 8.17:
opam pin add coq-core https://github.com/ejgallego/coq.git#v8.17+lsp
Known problems
- Current rendering code can be slow with complex goals and messages, if that's the case, please open an issue and set the option
Coq LSP > Method to Print Coq Terms to 0 as a workaround. coq-lsp can fail to interrupt Coq in some cases, such as Qed or type class search. If that's the case, please open an issue, we have a experimental branch that solves this problem that you can try.- Working with multiple files in Coq < 8.17 requires a Coq patch, see below for instructions.
- If you install
coq-lsp/VSCode simultaneously with the VSCoq Visual Studio Code extension, Visual Studio Code gets confused and neither of them may work. coq-lsp will warn about that. You can disable the VSCoq extension as a workaround. _CoqProject file parsing library will often exit 1 on bad _CoqProject files! There is little coq-lsp can do here, until upstream fixes this.
Troubleshooting
- Some problems can be resolved by restarting
coq-lsp, in Visual Studio Code, Ctrl+Shift+P will give you access to the coq-lsp.restart command. You can also start / stop the server from the status bar. - In VSCode, the "Output" window will have a "Coq LSP Server Events" channel which should contain some important information; the content of this channel is controlled by the
Coq LSP > Trace: Server option.
📔 Planned Features
See planned features and contribution ideas for a list of things we'd like to happen.
📕 Protocol Documentation
coq-lsp mostly implements the LSP Standard, plus some extensions specific to Coq.
Check the coq-lsp protocol documentation for more details.
🤸 Contributing and Extending the System
Contributions are very welcome! Feel free to chat with the dev team in Zulip for any question, or just go ahead and hack.
We have a contributing guide, which includes a description of the organization of the codebase, developer workflow, and more.
Here is a list of project ideas that could be of help in case you are looking for contribution ideas, tho we are convinced that the best ideas will arise from using coq-lsp in your own Coq projects.
Both Flèche and coq-lsp have a preliminary plugin system. The VSCode extension also exports and API so other extensions use its functionality to query and interact with Coq documents.
🥷 Team
- Ali Caglayan (co-coordinator)
- Emilio J. Gallego Arias (Inria Paris, co-coordinator)
- Shachar Itzhaky (Technion)
🕰️ Past Contributors
- Vincent Laporte (Inria)
- Ramkumar Ramachandra (Inria Paris)
The license for this project is LGPL 2.1 (or GPL 3+ as stated in the LGPL 2.1).
- This server forked from our previous LSP implementation for the Lambdapi proof assistant, written by Emilio J. Gallego Arias, Frédéric Blanqui, Rodolphe Lepigre, and others; the initial port to Coq was done by Emilio J. Gallego Arias and Vicent Laporte.
- Syntax files in editor/code are partially derived from VSCoq by Christian J. Bell, distributed under the terms of the MIT license (see ./editor/code/License-vscoq.text).
👏 Acknowledgments
Work on this server has been made possible thanks to many discussions, inspirations, and sharing of ideas from colleagues. In particular, we'd like to thank Rudi Grinberg, Andrey Mokhov, Clément Pit-Claudel, and Makarius Wenzel for their help and advice. Gaëtan Gilbert contributed many key and challenging Coq patches essential to coq-lsp; we also thank Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni for his memprof-limits library, which is essential to make coq-lsp on the real world, as well for many advice w.r.t. OCaml.
As noted above, the original implementation was based on the Lambdapi LSP server, thanks to all the collaborators in that project!