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Disable system bell in msys

February 8th, 2009 by Phil

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.

Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

6 Responses

  1. Thanks :-) @ 1am that beep is quite loud!

    Posted by Liam on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:51 am

  2. Many thanks you saved my day.
    Great tip about $HOME.

    Posted by Andrey on July 19th, 2009 at 8:58 am

  3. Thanks. Any idea how to make it shut up when using git-archive?

    Posted by Htbaa on July 21st, 2009 at 8:20 am

  4. No idea, but it sounds more like a system setting to me. Check your Sounds config!

    Posted by Phil on July 22nd, 2009 at 6:14 pm

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

    Posted by don on December 9th, 2009 at 5:15 pm

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

    Posted by Elijah Insua on December 12th, 2009 at 6:36 am

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