1.5 Invisible text in Emacs Info

Before discussing menus, we need to make some remarks that are only relevant to users reading Info using Emacs. Users of the stand-alone version can skip this node by typing ] now.

In Emacs, certain text that appears in the stand-alone version is normally hidden, technically because it has the ‘invisibility’ property. Invisible text is really a part of the text. It becomes visible (by default) after killing and yanking, it appears in printed output, it gets saved to file just like any other text, and so on. Thus it is useful to know it is there.

You can make invisible text visible by using the command M-x visible-mode. Visible mode is a minor mode, so using the command a second time will make the text invisible again. Watch the effects of the command on the “menu” below and the top line of this node.

If you prefer to always see the invisible text, you can set Info-hide-note-references to nil. Enabling Visible mode permanently is not a real alternative, because Emacs Info also uses (although less extensively) another text property that can change the text being displayed, the ‘display’ property. Only the invisibility property is affected by Visible mode. When, in this tutorial, we refer to the ‘Emacs’ behavior, we mean the default Emacs behavior.

Now type ], to learn about the ] and [ commands.