References (bibliography) to one line

Question

I would like to list references in a single line continuously without line breaks. There is a good example of doing this: Reduce natbib bibliography to one line

In the above link, I tried Lev Bishop's answer and it worked very well. But in this answer, I would like to change the bullets to just numbering (e.g., if I have three references, then "1...; [2]...; [3]..."). So, I played some time with the \olditem[\textbullet] part. But, I couldn't find the solution.

How can I use the auto-numbering (e.g., [item number]) in this code, instead of the bullet?

EDIT

Here I give a short example of my latex code of the issue.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{colorlinks,linkcolor={blue},citecolor={blue},urlcolor={blue}} 
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\usepackage{textgreek}
\setlength{\bibsep}{0pt}
\usepackage{paralist}

\let\olditem\item
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}%
  \section*{3~~~References}
  \let\par\relax\let\newblock\relax
%  \renewcommand{\item}[1][]{\olditem[\textbullet]}%
  \inparaenum}{\endinparaenum}

\textheight=247mm
\textwidth=180mm
\topmargin=-7mm
\oddsidemargin=-10mm
\evensidemargin=-10mm
\parindent 10pt
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%%%%% Start of document %%%%% 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{plain}
\pagenumbering{arabic}
%================================================================================
\section{Good day}

Hello.

\begin{thebibliography}{}
\bibitem[abcde et al.(2999)]{abcde}
abcde, z., et al. 2999, GGG, 123, 4;

...
...(this is just a short description, so all references are omitted)
...

\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}

Thanks to frabjous's suggestion, now all references start with [number] automatically. But, I have two more questions. As you can see the capture image (resultant reference section produced by the above example) below,

[Q1] There are unwanted empty spaces between references. How can I remove them?

[Q2] Is there a way to give a color only to the heading numbers in the Reference section? For example, (1)...; (2)... --> colored (1)...; colored (2)...

Answer 1

To sum up what I wrote in the comments, to return the list labels to numbers, use \usepackage[numbers]{natbib} and remove the line \renewcommand{\item}[1][]{\olditem[\textbullet]} line from Lev Bishop's answer in the linked answer.

To remove the gaps between the list items, add \let\hfil\relax to \let\par\relax\let\newblock\relax in that answer.

To color the labels, you could do, for example, \let\oldbibitem\bibitem \RenewDocumentCommand{\bibitem}{om}{{\color{blue}\oldbibitem[#1]{#2}}}; change the color to whatever you want, and load the xcolor package with one of its options to add to the possible color names. (See its documentation.)

So all in all, we have something like:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{colorlinks,linkcolor={blue},citecolor={blue},urlcolor={blue}} 
\usepackage{textgreek}
\setlength{\bibsep}{0pt}
\usepackage{paralist}

\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}%
  \section*{3~~~References}
  \let\par\relax\let\newblock\relax\let\hfil\relax
  \inparaenum}{\endinparaenum}

\let\oldbibitem\bibitem
\RenewDocumentCommand{\bibitem}{om}{{\color{blue}\oldbibitem[#1]{#2}}}

\textheight=247mm
\textwidth=180mm
\topmargin=-7mm
\oddsidemargin=-10mm
\evensidemargin=-10mm
\parindent 10pt
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%%%%% Start of document %%%%% 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{plain}
\pagenumbering{arabic}
%================================================================================
\section{Good day}

Hello.

\begin{thebibliography}{}

\bibitem[abcde et al.(2999)]{abcde}
abcde, z., et al. 2999, GGG, 123, 4;

...

\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}