Native LSP config in Neovim V0.11

Date: 28 Mar 2025

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Last time I did a major rewrite of my vim config, was back around 2022 when I changed from vimscript to all lua. Which was a major improvement for doing small tweaks here and there and making dynamic configurations.

Now a couple of years later, a new version 0.11 has been released with some features I’m really keen about.

• Easier native LSP config
• Builtin auto-completion (cmp) using the omnifunc
• Improved the vim.lsp.buf.hover() to support markdown tree-sitter highlighting.

In this post I’m gonna go through my config migration from using nvim-lspconfig to using the new vim.lsp.enable interface.

Neovim LSP with nvim-lspconfig

Neovim added native LSP support back in v0.5, but it never felt like native LSP support as the configuration was a nightmare, so nvim-lspconfig came to the rescue. Making configuration of the builtin LSP very easy and intuitive.

Example of a language server configuration for vscode-html-language-server:

require("lspconfig")["html"].setup{
    on_attach = on_attach,
    flags = lsp_flags,
    capabilities = CAPABILITIES,
    filetypes = { "html" }
}

The on_attach param is used for executing code during the attachment of a LSP client. I used this feature for applying different dynamic configs as:

local function on_attach(client, bufnr)
    lsp_keymaps(bufnr)
    lsp_highlight_document(client)
    lsp_diagnostic_config()
    lsp_icons()
    lsp_handlers()
end

Neovim native LSP configuration

From v0.11 neovim now support two new API interfaces: vim.lsp.config() and vim.lsp.enable(). Therefor LSP configuration can now be done 100% independent of nvim-lspconfig, in a very intuitive way.

How to load language servers

The first thing was figuring out how to do the initial LSP config for language servers.

Reading through the newsletter helped out a lot with migrating the config.

The new version supports loading language server configurations dynamically by creating a lsp folder in the neovim config root like so: ~/.config/nvim/lsp/, and adding lua files returning a dictionary.

The former html language server config now looks like this:

neovim/lsp/html.lua:

return {
    cmd = { 'vscode-html-language-server', '--stdio' },
    filetypes = { 'html' }
}

and for enabling the language server call the new vim.lsp.enable() interface from your lua config like so:

neovim/lua/init.lua:

vim.lsp.enable({'html'})

or with multiple language servers (a corresponding lsp/<lang>.lua is required):

neovim/lua/init.lua:

vim.lsp.enable({
    'ansible',
    'bash',
    'css',
    'html',
    'json',
    'lua',
    'pyright',
    'yaml',
})

Tags: Neovim