How to fix missing / flickering images in w3m?

I use w3m to browse websites inside a shell, e.g.

w3m

w3m supports displaying images the rendering seems buggy. They sometimes won't show at all, or will flicker when scrolling.

This is an example of the problematic output:

gif animation of the image rendering problem in w3m, not showing the image, and having them flicker during scroll

I am using terminator, yet also could reproduce the behavior using konsole and terminal.

1 Answer

This seems to be an issue with anti-aliasing.

After I disabled anti-aliasing in my xresources the flickering went away.

Of course, now the font rendering is ugly, but it showcases that w3m is having issues with font rendering when it comes to anti-aliasing.

The following is an example of how the disable anti aliasing in the .Xresources:

Xft.antialias: 0