Neovim 0.8 Adds a Window Bar and Lua Filetype Detection

Neovim 0.8 arrives

Neovim 0.8 was released on September 30, 2022. The release continued Neovim's push toward a Lua-first editor while keeping its Vim heritage, mixing user-facing features with a large amount of internal refactoring.

A window bar and filetype.lua

The release added 'winbar', a per-window bar that can display status information above each window's content, and enabled filetype.lua by default, moving filetype detection from Vimscript to a faster Lua implementation. It also added vim.fs functions such as parents(), dirname(), basename(), find() and normalize() for path handling.

Command preview and defaults

Neovim 0.8 introduced preview functionality for user commands, extending the live 'inccommand' idea to custom commands, and made several default changes: the mouse is now enabled by default (mouse=nvi), * and # search the visual selection, and clicking is supported in 'statusline' and 'winbar'. An experimental cmdheight=0 option lets users hide the command line entirely.

LSP and Treesitter

The built-in LSP client gained LspAttach and LspDetach autocommands, a vim.lsp.buf.format function, a start function, and TCP support. Treesitter work included bundling the Lua parser and queries, adding a vim.treesitter.start() function, and moving to @foo.bar style highlight groups. On Windows, the terminal dropped winpty and now requires Windows 10 1809 or later.

Related on Skillo

See also: Neovim 0.9 and the new default colour scheme.

Sources

• Nvim v0.8.0 release (github.com/neovim)

Published date reflects the original event date (2022-09-30). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.