Neovim 0.9 Adds statuscolumn and LSP Semantic Tokens

Neovim 0.9 lands

Neovim 0.9 was released on April 7, 2023. The release added a mix of UI, scripting and LSP features while removing several long-deprecated pieces, including the .deb release, the hardcopy command and cscope support.

A configurable status column

The headline UI addition was 'statuscolumn', a new option that lets users fully customize the column to the left of the text, including line numbers, fold and sign columns, using the same expression syntax as the statusline. The release also added a title in the border of floating windows and a splitkeep option to control scroll behavior when opening and closing splits.

LSP semantic tokens

Neovim 0.9 introduced initial support for LSP semantic token highlighting, letting language servers drive richer, context-aware highlighting, along with functions to get semantic tokens at the cursor and support for workspace/didChangeWatchedFiles. It also rendered Markdown in hover docs and added a bufnr option to lsp.start.

EditorConfig, Lua and Treesitter

The release added built-in EditorConfig support that can be toggled dynamically, and made Lua more central: 'nvim -l' runs a Lua script, ':=expr' is shorthand for ':lua =expr', and vim.loader was added. Treesitter gained the :InspectTree command, bundled its own query parser and queries, upstreamed foldexpr from nvim-treesitter, and renamed the help parser to vimdoc.

Related on Skillo

See also: Neovim 0.8 and the winbar, Neovim 0.10 and inlay hints.

Sources

• Nvim v0.9.0 release (github.com/neovim)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-04-07). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.