Colored and styled underlines - kitty
Description: kitty supports colored and styled (wavy) underlines. This is of particular use in terminal editors such as vim and emacs to display red, wavy underlines under mis-spelled words and/or syntax errors...

Hide navigation sidebar
Hide table of contents sidebar
Back to top
Toggle table of contents sidebar

# Colored and styled underlines

kitty supports colored and styled (wavy) underlines. This is of particular use in terminal editors such as vim and emacs to display red, wavy underlines under mis-spelled words and/or syntax errors. This is done by re-purposing some SGR escape codes that are not used in modern terminals (CSI codes)

To set the underline style:

    <ESC>[4:0m  # this is no underline
    <ESC>[4:1m  # this is a straight underline
    <ESC>[4:2m  # this is a double underline
    <ESC>[4:3m  # this is a curly underline
    <ESC>[4:4m  # this is a dotted underline
    <ESC>[4:5m  # this is a dashed underline
    <ESC>[4m    # this is a straight underline (for backwards compat)
    <ESC>[24m   # this is no underline (for backwards compat)

To set the underline color (this is reserved and as far as I can tell not actually used for anything):

    <ESC>[58...m

This works exactly like the codes `38, 48` that are used to set foreground and background color respectively.

To reset the underline color (also previously reserved and unused):

    <ESC>[59m

The underline color must remain the same under reverse video, if it has a color, if not, it should follow the foreground color.

To detect support for this feature in a terminal emulator, query the terminfo database for the `Su` boolean capability.