# Reference Link

A special type of reference link can be configured by using the !ref specifier in a link.

[!ref](/guides/getting-started.md)

By default, the text of the link is not required if the .md page you are linking to is within the project. Retype will automatically use the label of the .md page as the link text.

The text of the link can be explicitly set by passing as the first part of the component config. In the following sample, we explicitly set the reference link text to Getting Started.

[!ref Getting Started](/guides/getting-started.md)

Clicking anywhere within the reference link component will navigate to that new page.

From a functionality perspective, there is no difference betwen a !ref component and a regular hyperlink. The difference between the two is just how they are presented, with a Reference Link component being more prominent than a regular hyperlink.

The icon used for the reference link component can be customized using a name/value pair syntax for the text and icon attributes. This allows for setting a custom icon and text value at the same time. The icon attribute can be initialize with one of the following:

• Octicon name
• Emoji :shortcode: (please see Mojee for a full list of supported Emoji shortcodes)
• Image file URL

The following samples demonstrate setting a custom icon:

[!ref icon="rocket"](/guides/getting-started.md)
[!ref icon=":rocket:"](/guides/getting-started.md)
[!ref icon="../static/retype-icon.svg"](/guides/getting-started.md)

Getting Started

/guides/getting-started/

By default, the referred page title is used as the component text value and the text can be customized by explicitly passing a separate text value.

[!ref icon="rocket" text="To the moon"](/guides/getting-started.md)

Sets the target attribute of the reference link and specifies which window or tab to open the link into.

[!ref target="blank" text="Retype"](https://retype.com/)

If no target is configured, the link will open in the current tab.

The target can be set to any value, although blank is common and will open the link in a new tab. Retype will automatically transform the value blank into _blank which is the actual value required by the browser to indicate that a hyperlink should be opened in a new tab.

There are several other values that may be prefixed with an _ character, including self, parent, and top. The following table demonstrates some common scenarios and naming convention used by Retype to normalize the target values.

See also the links.target configuration.