Disable system bell in msys

08 February, 2009

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.

See other posts tagged with general git msys and all posts made in February 2009.

Comments

Liam

22 June, 2009 at 23:51

Thanks 🙂 @ 1am that beep is quite loud!

Andrey

19 July, 2009 at 07:58

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

Htbaa

21 July, 2009 at 07:20

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

Phil

22 July, 2009 at 17:14

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

don

09 December, 2009 at 16:15

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

Elijah Insua

12 December, 2009 at 05:36

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

Ben

25 June, 2011 at 14:23

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).

Dylan

26 June, 2011 at 23:43

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

Fabian

06 September, 2011 at 16:58

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

Bl0ckeduser

21 February, 2012 at 23:36

Many thanks. I tried several other things but they didn’t work in MinGW.

Paul

25 February, 2012 at 09:47

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.)

haydn

14 January, 2014 at 12:32

Thanks! Great tip for me!