13 Colors and Styles

You can choose to highlight parts of Info’s display, such as cross-references and search matches, using a variety of styles, including colors, boldface and underline. Here are the variables that are available to do this:

link-style ¶

Used for cross-references and menu entries.

active-link-style ¶

Used for a cross-reference or menu entry when typing RET would have the effect of following said cross-reference or menu entry.

match-style ¶

Used for matches from a search command. (See Searching an Info File.)

Each of these is given in the .infokey file just as the variables in the previous chapter. Their values are a comma-separated list of values in the following table:

black ¶

red

green

yellow

blue

magenta

cyan

white

Use the color specified for text.

nocolor

nocolour

Turn off any color that was in effect, using the terminal’s default color.

bgblack ¶

bgred

bggreen

bgyellow

bgblue

bgmagenta

bgcyan

bgwhite

Use the color specified for the background.

bgnocolor

bgnocolour

Use the terminal’s default background color.

underline ¶

nounderline

Turn text underline on or off.

standout

nostandout

Turn ‘standout mode’ on or off. Standout mode entails the use of appearance modes that make text stand out, and varies between terminals.

bold ¶

regular

nobold

Turn boldface on or off.

blink ¶

noblink

Make the text blink, or not.

Here is an sample excerpt from an .infokey file:

#var
link-style=yellow
active-link-style=yellow,bold
match-style=underline,bold,nocolor

With this, cross-references are all yellow, and active cross-references are additionally displayed in bold. Any search matches will be shown in bold, and underlined. Moreover, if there is a search match inside a cross-reference, the ‘nocolor’ rendition style will cancel the yellow color, leaving the text in the match the terminal’s default color. (Note, however, that the rendition styles for active cross-references take priority over those for search matches, so search matches there will still be displayed in yellow.)