What?

I like kitty, “The fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal emulator”. Yes, I really do. I also like using w3m, a relativly old but nice console-based webbrowser. Now kitty can actually display real images in it’s view but I had a harrd time in finding out how

  • to configure kitty,
  • to configure w3m,
  • and which dang library is actually in use.

Finding the information turned out to be hard, so here, without further ado, what needs to be done.

How it looks like:

Screenshot of w3m running in kitty, displaying images, in action

Figure 1: Screenshot of w3m running in kitty, displaying images, in action

Instructions

Common

Obviously: Install kitty.

Fedora 36

Luckily the w3m shipped with FC36 was already compiled ‘The Right Way™’ and all you need to do is configuring the correct image protocol & enable loading of pictures. Open /etc/w3m/config (as root) or create your own ~/.w3m/config, adding these two statements:

inline_img_protocol 4
auto_image TRUE

Boom, works.

Debian bullseye/sid

No luck here, w3m too old. Hence uninstall any existing w3m and it’s complimentary package w3m-img and compile a fresh one.

git clone https://github.com/tats/w3m
cd w3m
./configure --with-imagelib=imlib2
make -j4
sudo make install

Turned out I need to compile against imlib2. Maybe other libs work too, but this worked for me right away.

Finally, create a copy of /usr/local/etc/w3m/config with just the two statements from the previous chapter.