Curious effect when using w3m with lxterminal

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi all,

yesterday I stumbled across something curious. Or should I say “weird”… ?

I was reading the article “Best Linux Task Managers You Can Run Comfortably in a GUI” on itsfoss.

To this end I employed w3m (text-based browser for the terminal).
The terminal emulator I used it in was lxterminal.

While reading the text I noticed that at some point there was an extra letter added (“s” in this case) where there should´ve been a whitespace.

Plus: it´s a different colour than the default one.
I reloaded the page but it had no effect. Still an additional “s”:

(“s” between “you” and “would”)

This phenomenon occurred more than once on the same page but the letter was “b” instead of “s”. So it´s not restricted to a particular letter.

I tried again today, but the “s” would still be there.
O.K., then there must be something fundamentally curious about the combination
of lxterminal and w3m because …

• the combination of w3m and xfce4-terminal didn´t produce this effect:

• neither did the combination of lxterminal and lynx:

Does anyone have an idea what might be going on

Thanks a lot and many greetings from Rosika

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

Grammar checking ?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/yous

used to mean “you”, when addressing a group of people that you are speaking to:
See yous later.

To be honest I have no idea, but auto correct came to mind

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

the combination
of lxterminal and w3m

Does lxterminal have a Preferences option?
Look at terminal type (TERM variable) and compare it to the xfce-terminal

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi @callpaul.eu and @nevj,

thanks a lot for your replies.

@callpaul.eu

Grammar checking ?

Well, this never occurred to me, Paul.
Curious that lxterminal would do things like these when it´s supposed to just display the contents of a website (using w3m).
You might be right all the same though.

Thanks for the link. The usage of “yous” was new to me.

@nevj

Does lxterminal have a Preferences option?

It has a settings tab but nothing TERM-related is to be seen.
Sorry, Neville.

Well, the phenomenon doesn´t bother me all too much.
it´s just something curious I have no explanation of.

It might be grammar checking after all, like Paul suggested.

Thanks all and many greetings from Rosika

P.S.:

Update:

I just stumbled across something else inexplicable:

Although there are a few occurrences of an additional letter introduced (in a different colour) on the webpage I found out that´s easy to get rid of it by just scrolling down with the mousewheel.
As soon as scrolling starts the additional letters vanish and the whitespace between the two words is clearly displayed, as it should be.

Funny thing, right?

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

When i read it I thought of

Gollum in lord of the rings and hobbit he kept saying es at the end of every word.

But dont think it was a real solution just an idea.

Funny how we read things and our mind triggers something totally off the wall

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

As soon as scrolling starts the additional letters vanish

What happens with the scrollbar?
Original display differs from scrolled display? That is a bug.

Only with w3m output…
Try this
w3m ..... | od -a | more
to see what w3m is sending. There may be special characters there.

@Rosika

It has a settings tab but nothing TERM-related is to be seen.

It might not be called TERM… that is the environment variable name, eg
echo $TERM
There will be someting in settings that changes it.

[daniel.m.tripp (Dan Tripp)]

Maybe 'cause space in a URL is “%s” - I don’t really know…

It always annoyed me when copying a full URL path - where there were spaces it came up as “%s”…

Ugly…

Not the ugliest URL though - the truly UGLY URLs I recall either have an *.exe at the end, or worse: a *.dll (or even a dll file somewhere in the URL)… Best way I can think of to advertise yourself to hackers!

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi again and thanks for your latest replies,

@nevj :

Curious thing again. I just tried it today. Indeed I tried a few times but I couldn´t reproduce the effect anymore.

@nevj

What happens with the scrollbar?

Well, actually nothing:

The scrollbar occupies the whole height of the terminal because the whole of text naturally doesn´t fit into the window without scrolling.

@nevj

Try this
w3m ..... | od -a | more

Thanks for the suggestion, Neville.

I´ll have to wait for the phenomenon to occur again (if it does at all).

@nevj

There will be someting in settings that changes it.

These are the 4 settings tab available (in German though):

No idea where “terminal type” can be found here…

Well, as I said, the additional letter doesn´t materialize today.
At the moment I´m stuck then.
Still: thanks a lot, Neville.

And thank you to @callpaul.eu and @daniel.m.tripp for your comments as well.

Many greetings from Rosika

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

These are the 4 settings tab available (in German though):

Well that tested me.
No there is no way to change what type of terminal it emulates.
It must be hardwired.
echo $TERM
from inside an lxterminal will tell you what it is.

BTW… I tried w3m in Termux
It runs, but I could not enter anything. Had to kill Termux to get out.

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi Neville,

sorry for the belated reply.

@nevj

No there is no way to change what type of terminal it emulates.
It must be hardwired.

Thanks for the fact-checking.

@nevj

echo $TERM
from inside an lxterminal will tell you what it is.

Thanks. I get xterm-256color as output:

rosika@rosika-Lenovo-H520e ~> echo $TERM
xterm-256color
rosika@rosika-Lenovo-H520e ~> xprop | grep WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "lxterminal", "Lxterminal"
WM_ICON_NAME(STRING) = "xprop | grep WM_CLASS /home/rosika"
_NET_WM_ICON_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "xprop | grep WM_CLASS /home/rosika"
WM_NAME(STRING) = "xprop | grep WM_CLASS /home/rosika"
_NET_WM_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "xprop | grep WM_CLASS /home/rosika"

…

@nevj

I tried w3m in Termux
It runs, but I could not enter anything. Had to kill Termux to get out

Curious.
On my smartphone w3m runs without any problems in termux.

E.g. `w3m “https://itsfoss.community” leads me to our forum page and displays it quite nicely".

Many greetings from Rosika

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

xterm-256color

Hi Rosika,

That should be OK… most of my terminals are that or gnome-256color.

Have a look at this topic

AntiX 23.1"Arditi del Popolo" is messing up my keyboard

I recently install this distro in the hope of performance gains over Win7. And performance gains it did, until i open the web browser and a funny happened.I couldn’t type any other address in the location bar for the simple reason the first row of character keys, the ones with linguistic signs, aren’t there! When i want type the key with the sign:, it gives me a 9. The key with//,i can’t find it! My question is: Is anyone experienced a similar issue with this distro, or anyone for that matter…

See the link on BOM codes

Regards
Neville

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi Neville,

@nevj

That should be OK… most of my terminals are that or gnome-256color.

Thanks. That´s good to know.
Thanks also for the link. To be honest, I´ve never heard of “byte-order mark (BOM)”.
Well, that´s interesting.
Amazing how much there is left for me to learn. Oh my! .

BTW:

any news about:

@nevj

BTW… I tried w3m in Termux
It runs, but I could not enter anything. Had to kill Termux to get out.

…

Have you tried entering w3m with a dedicated URL assigned?
Like w3m "https://itsfoss.community"
That should work.

Many greetings from Rosika

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

any news

No news on w3m. I removed it. Space is a bit tight on my tablet.

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

@nevj :

@nevj

No news on w3m. I removed it. Space is a bit tight on my tablet.

Thanks for the feedback, Neville.
That´s perfectly alright, of course.

Cheers from Rosika

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

alright

Hi Rosika,
Doing my tax return… late as usual.
I will get back to w3m… it is clever the way it uses the terminal to layout a page.

I found an interesting CLI image viewer called timg that displays an image inside your terminal window.

Regards
Nevilke

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi Neville,

@nevj

w3m… it is clever the way it uses the terminal to layout a page.

Yes, you´re right. I like it a lot, too.
For me the its main benefit is that it´s a great help in saving quite a lot of data.
As I´m on a metered connection (5 GB per 28 days) I make excessive use of w3m at the beginning of each billing period.

No unnecessary images (animated or otherwise) have to be downloaded. Saves quite a lot of data this way.

Thanks for mentioning ting. It´s all new to me.

env LANG=en_GB:en apt-cache show timg
[...]
Description-en: terminal image and video viewer
 A user-friendly viewer that uses 24-Bit color capabilities and unicode
 character blocks to display images, animations and videos in the terminal.
[...]

So it´s not only an image viewer but a video viewer as well. Interesting.

Many greetings from Rosika

P.S.:

Good luck with your tax return.