Color highlighting / CODE emphasis

Can't see a way to use COLOR in a post. I particularly like to highlight specific points in [CODE] samples.

In fact I can't see any way to highlight anything within [CODE] blocks. There are miles of options in Markdown, but nothing that I spotted that would help. Some others that I tried (such as using 2xtilde for strikeout) didn't work, so might be that the Markdown implementation is incomplete/young.

strikeout test

Any ideas please?

There are a couple of plugins for Discourse, but I have no idea what would be involved with installing them and whether they bring instability too?:

I think this is the "official" one:

Also found this: