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Upgrading to neovim 0.12

Published on: 5/20/2026

Last edited on: 5/23/2026

I recently upgraded my neovim to 0.12.2, I have been chipping away at it slowly using NVIM_APPNAME feature so that my day to day activities are not hindered. One of the things I found interesting in using NVIM_APPNAME is, I saw a blog where author manually create all the ~/.local/share/nvim-next etc dirs, I did the same cause I was not aware, but later I realized that one can literally just say NVIM_APPNAME=nvim-next ~/.local/share/bob/0.12/bin/nvim and neovim will automatically make all those dirs for you. Also yes, I use awesome bob-nvim for managing neovim versions. With that out of the way, lets get started!

Major changes

Cool, lets talk about major changes, listing them out first:

Migrating to builtin package manager

Neovim now comes with an inbuilt package manager called vim.pack, its currently experimental but is considered good enough for daily driving. I have used a bunch of package managers over time, vim-plugin, packer, lazy and now vim.pack. While I don’t care about them a lot, each migration has been inspired by reasons. vim-plug -> packer, lua shift of whole ecosystem. packer -> lazy.nvim, extra features like dependencies, clean config, etc and finally lazy -> vim.pack cause I want to reduce count of external dependencies. With all the changes happening upstream, I am really hopeful that some day my whole config will just fit in a small file!

But I couldn’t simply move to using vim.pack, I had to evaluate if it was strictly an upgrade. Factors I looked for:

For dependencies section, I went through my plugin list and realized I had these dependencies:

These don’t seem that bad, all of them are loaded much later in the neovim startup process and I could just keep them in a particular order to make the resolution pass. Well I tried it and that did work out, so ticked this off.

For my startup times, I used nvim --startuptime startuptime.log .. If you are not familiar with this command, it instructs neovim to write a log of its startup activities and to get startup time you would look for log --- NVIM STARTED ---, first number in that row is the amount of seconds it took to startup your neovim. I measured this and realized I hadn’t used “lazy” in lazy.nvim package manager 😭. But I never felt the need to make it go faster, cause I wasn’t able to perceive a delay when starting it. Day I start noticing the delay is the day I bring down my hammer. I had done this earlier for my shell too. But after the migration, timings seemed the same, actually a bit better than lazy.nvim, so I was already happy :)

For config structure, I really liked how lazy forced a dir structure of plugins and encouraged keeping config along side plugin installation line itself. It was a clean way. With vim.pack I had two ways:

I wanted to maintain order remember? That can easily be done with a single vim.pack.add and listing down all the plugins together with their install order. But with plugin/ dir, I would have to name files 0_, 1_ etc. This is because files in plugin/ are loaded automatically by vim and neovim in sorted order. Naming files like that was a turn off for me, so I went with single vim.pack.add call and created a new dir called plugins/ in lua/ dir and shoved all plugin related config there. I enforced setup order in lua/plugins/init.lua.

With all of this out of the way, migration was really SMOOTH! And I kinda love that I am not pulling a heavy dependency like lazy.nvim in my dep tree :)

If you have advanced usecases or want to understand the feature better, there are two awesome guides: official manual and then https://echasnovski.com/blog/2026-03-13-a-guide-to-vim-pack.html. Read it end-to-end, each section has something you can take away. It is the most comprehensive guide out there right now.

One small trick I learned from the article above is placing vim.loader.enable speeds up startup times for free and this is blessed on us by Folke himself!! Ofc I added that and instantly realized 25ms off the loading time xD

LSP

Neovim v0.12 also brings in more ergonomic LSP usage support. Now, you can place LSP server setting in lsp/ dir and just call vim.lsp.enable(<file-name-in-lsp-dir>)' and this is all the setup you need! nvim-lspconfig is now reduced to just maintain settings for upstream LSP servers. As these rarely change, I just copied from upstream and placed in my lsp/ dir, I also realized I only use two of them now: rust_analyzer and taplo (toml LSP server, also for rust dev :P). With this, I was able to cut down a bunch of lines in my LSP config and also trim down deps of nvim-lspconfig and mason-lspconfig.

ui2

This is an experimental feature where command line meets messages meets pager meets dialog windows. Honestly its best explained in official docs. This was an interesting change which allowed me to trim down a dep I really liked: fidget.nvim. It shows LSP progress on the bottom right corner. Now I do it in ui2 itself using this autocommand, that’s it, 15 lines are all we need. I get the progress in same place as command line without Hit Enter prompts.

This works best with cmdheight = 0 , which prevents Hit Enter prompts. cmdheight feature was merged in 0.11 itself, I had tried it then but it felt incomplete and weird, but now with ui2 it has the perfect UX, they have really nailed this! There’s just one small hiccup, somehow I am not able to see marco record messages, I could reproduce it on master with minimal config so its definitely an upstream issue, hopefully that gets fixed, but till then I have two hacky autocmds which almost do the same job just slightly worse 🙃.

No vimscript in config

I finally took the leap and ditched out all the vimscript from my config, its completely lua based now! I know I am very late to the party, but I really wanted to keep it around so that I can use it on VMs where vim is the default. Well what finally prompted this move was making a minimal vimscript based vim config, which I can easily drop anywhere and get productive with vim! Here’s the minimal config for the curious. I also have a minimal tmux config in the same lines here.

Bugs discovered

This is an interesting section cause I usually never come across any hiccups when upgrading, neovim is a super polished, heavily tested software. People are out there doing builds super frequently to test latest and greatest! ( I was one of them till few years ago :P )

But this release I came across two interesting bugs!

First one we have already discussed, I hope it gets fixed in an upcoming version or even next release is fine :P

For the second one, this is something severe and I was very astonished to come across it! First, link to bug report: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/39815

minimal repro is just:

require('vim._core.ui2').enable()
vim.cmd [[
set rtp+=$LMAO " Cannot be a non-existing dir, needs to be an env var which does not exist
set syntax
]]

So conditions are:

The reason I came across this is because of this weird rtp setting I had set in my config:

set rtp+=$GOPATH/src/golang.org/x/lint/misc/vim

I have no recollection why I had added this, I have messed around a lot with my config over the years, so there are artifacts I still find in weird corners. But main point being, I don’t have golang installed in my system, so GOPATH is not set and hence satisfies condition we mentioned above. I am not exactly sure what is causing this crash in neovim internally, it needs some investigation 🧐.

But yeah interesting times! I created a new APPNAME with nvim-debug and managed to track it down to this config and also reproduce on latest master. I have reported it, let’s see if someone upstream picks it up before I get my hands dirty 🏃.

Sides

I was checking :checkhealth vim.lsp and realized I hadn’t seen :checkhealth in a while, I did that and boom, it was so much cleaner!! Now we have ✅ and ❌ and ⚠️ to show overall health of the features etc, and in general it looked really really clean!

There are also other features like :restart, etc which I didn’t delve into much cause I wasn’t sure how to make use of those features right now. There are bunch of other features too, do go through all the release notes. Amount of things I have realized by reading the release notes in detail is mind blowing, 100% recommended!

Conclusion

Overall, I am super happy with this new release, only thing I couldn’t change this time is colorscheme, I didn’t have any lined up to try out 😓.

Except that, I am already looking forward to more amazing things in upcoming releases (multi-cursor looking at you). Till then, chao!