Disable system bell in msys

I am using Git on the command line in Windows via msysgit.

As with all msys installs whenever you press backspace and there is no more text to delete or you press TAB for auto-complete when there are multiple options, your speaker utters an horrendous, ugly beep.

To disable this, load msys and find out where your home directory is:

echo $HOME

Go to that directory (either in Windows or through msys) and create a new file called .inputrc

Put one line in that file:

set bell-style none

Save it and restart msys. You should now have no system bell! I’ve also seen it advised that you can disable your system bell by disabling the hardware emulation for this device in Device Manager, but this didn’t seem to work for me in Vista.

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12 thoughts on “Disable system bell in msys”

  1. Thanks a lot! Here we are in a new millenium +1 decade and we still have “beepy” things from the 70’s.

  2. Thanks! I used curl to grab a binary (without piping) and fell into a loud hell. Now it’s a bit quieter.

  3. Thanks! The file already existed in my install (line 14). If this is the case for anyone else, just edit that line (change audible to none).

  4. A more direct route would be to issue this command from the msys shell:
    echo “set bell-style none” >> $HOME/.inputrc

  5. Thanks. The beep already tortured by eardrums quite a few times, but not anymore 😉

  6. This will disable tab-completion for directories for me. If you want to keep the settings you had before, you may do the following

    cd $HOME && cp /etc/inputrc ./.inputrc && vim .inputrc

    (Replace vim with the editor you prefer.)

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