Modulated optical signals are received in a coherent optical receiver employing both post digital filter and inter-symbol-interference (ISI) equalizer such as a maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) or Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithms. Some disclosed techniques are directed to adaptively adjusting the impulse response in time domain (or equivalently the frequency response in frequency domain) of the post digital filter and the corresponding structure of ISI equalizer in different spectrum-narrowing operation scenarios.