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I'm looking for an option to wrap lines of rendered HTML in w3m when they reach a certain length, say 72 characters. By default the text spans the entire width of the window and reading becomes difficult. Here's a screenshot of how an article looks by default in fullscreen w3m:

In newsbeuter I was able to get the behavior I wanted easily with text-width 72. The same article with text nicely wrapped in newsbeuter:

Is there a way to achieve this kind of line-wrapping at 72 characters in w3m?

The data for the views above is available at this url:

https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2017/05/why_the_politic.html

Run w3m with relevant options to dump formatted page to standard output, then pipe the standard output to less command. However, no such options in w3m configuration file.

What options and how

Manual page w3m(1) has mentioned the following options.

   -dump  dump formatted page into stdout



   -cols width

          specify column width (used with -dump)

To set column width at 72, use those options like this:

$ w3m -dump -cols 72 [URL or filename]

Since -dump option produce standard output, you can't really do normal browsing (w3m will dump formatted page and exit). Pipe to less to browse the formatted page.

$ w3m -dump -cols 72 [URL or filename] | less

The last one-line command is all you need.

Normal browsing by w3m

Formatted page browsing by w3m and less

Notice that first-half of the page is wrapped nicely within the column width specified. The screenshots above are browsing this article: w3m on Wikipedia.

Remarks

The -dump option will remove the hyperlinks all together when producing the formatted page. If column width is the only criteria that you need, this option will suffice.

To this answered date, I am not aware of other ways to also preserve the hyperlinks.

You could simply change the terminal's number of columns through stty, e.g., stty cols 72 and then run w3m <url>. That's what I do sometimes.

There are two problems with this, however:

1. Even if you aliased w3m to stty cols 72 && w3m, you'd still have to reset the line width after your browsing session if you don't want it to stay at 72 columns. This could be automated through a little wrapper script, though.




2. When you're in an X terminal, the stty setting will be void as soon as you resize the window. (I've tested this in xterm and urxvt.)