Some time ago, I've been looking into status bar codes (bulb, arrowu, error, chackbox, fdbi, oned, etc..). It'd be awesome if these would be officially supported in columns 
Is this about status bar codes, or some other type of markup / icons / etc.?
(Most of those don't look like status bar codes to me, and most status bar codes wouldn't make sense in columns, as far as I can think.)
I think columns can already use markup, but they have to say they want it to avoid misinterpreting other data that isn't meant to be markup.
This is mostly about the icons, though I'd love to use markup in columns. I tried using the statusbar codes in columns but it didn't work. How do I get a column to use an icon?
If they're the ones I think you mean, those icons are done through markup. They don't really have anything to do with the status bar (other than that they can be used on it as well as other places).
Having to guess a bit here, without concrete examples of what you want to do.
Support for markup in script columns was added in Directory Opus 13.11.1 (Beta) - see the Scripting part of that for the details, and make sure you have the latest beta installed (at least until 13.12 is out, which will add the new functionality to a stable release).
A concrete example would be to display an icon in a column using
scriptColData.columns("TEST").value = "<%tbim:rename>";
or, in the case of an evaluator column:
return ("<%tbim:rename>");
The change in the beta Leo refers to lets scripts provide markup text as column data for display in infotips. Currently column data displayed in the Lister itself doesn't support markup.