Lex writes:
The caret [...] is between characters rather than on them like older block cursors. The column indicated by the status bar is the character to the left of the caret [...].
JBF writes:
I understand, but the usefulness of the value after "col:" in the status bar is to indicate in which column you will write if you type a key now. Not the number of characters before that position.
I don't really use Geany very often, so I haven't noticed this before, but I agree with JBF. There is nothing wrong with the reasoning given by Lex, which I also understand completely, but the fact is that virtually every editor out there gives you the column of the character immediately to the right of the vertical bar. Regardless of which way is "more logical", most of us are used to having the column number tell us which character we are about to type next. (And if an error message or search result tells us to go to a particular position in the file, we expect that putting the caret there will result in having our error/result show up immediately to the right of the vertical bar.)
All that said, I think it's not too big a deal. I guess a preference setting might be nice, but there are already a huge number of settings. And plenty of Geany users have not been bothered by the status bar, so either they don't use it, or they don't care, or they have adjusted to it.
John