I'd like to prevent the Mac Terminal program from beeping, for example when there are multiple possible completions when I hit TAB. I looked in the preferences, but there's nothing about beeping.
9 Answers
In OS X Leopard (10.5 and later)
- Open Terminal.
- On the menu go to Terminal > Preferences.
- Open Settings > Advanced ("Profiles" tab for Big Sur)
- Un-check the "Audible Bell" option. (You can also set "visible bell" which will cause your terminal to flash instead of beep)
In OS X Tiger (10.4 and earlier):
- Open Terminal.
- On the menu go to Terminal > Window Settings.
- In the Terminal Inspector window click on the drop-down list and select Emulation.
- Un-check the "Audible Bell" option. (You can also set "visible bell" which will cause your terminal to flash instead of beep)
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4Under Leopard, the same settings are avaliable under Terminal > Preferences, under the Settings > Advanced tabs.– Chris LutzSep 24, 2009 at 2:34
I'm presuming you have Leopard, whose terminal is greatly improved over Tiger's.
Terminal menu --> Preferences --> Settings tab --> Advanced --> Bell.
Untick "Audible bell"
(btw, mine doesn't beep as far as I can tell, even though that setting is enabled for me)
put "set bell-style visible" in your ~/.bashrc
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1@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen, it’s probably better to configure specific programs to not beep for specific events, rather than disabling the terminal bell altogether, since it’s usually used for things that may need the user’s attention. Going the other direction, if all beeps in the terminal are annoying, there’s a good chance the user will also find beeps annoying in other applications, in which case they should consider muting “sound effects” system-wide in System Preferences > Sound. Jan 5, 2012 at 21:07
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See also
inputrc
,show-all-if-ambiguous
andshow-all-if-unmodified
in the Bash man page, to specifically avoid beeping during autocompletion. x-man-page://1/bash Jun 15, 2012 at 0:00
The process is a bit different in El Capitan.
OS X El Capitan (10.11)
- Open Terminal.
- On the menu go to Terminal > Preferences.
- Choose the Profile tab
- Choose the profile from the left panel.
- Un-check the Audible Bell option.
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3And the bell options are now in Advanced tab under each individual profiles.– zyyMay 5, 2020 at 16:39
On Big Sur (10.1)
- open terminal app
- On the menu go to Terminal > Preferences.
- select Profiles (your profile should be highlighted)
- select Advanced tab on far right
- uncheck bell under Bell
System preferences --> sound --> then choose an alert sound [choose what you want]
then quit and reopen the terminal.
Use ITERM2 and RX click to change all the settings (you might enable visual bel, to see when you make some mistakes without being bothered by sounds)
To do it via terminal:
TERMINAL_PLIST="$HOME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist"
TERMINAL_THEME=`/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print 'Default Window Settings'" $TERMINAL_PLIST`
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set 'Window Settings':$TERMINAL_THEME:Bell false" $TERMINAL_PLIST
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set 'Window Settings':$TERMINAL_THEME:VisualBellOnlyWhenMuted false" $TERMINAL_PLIST
If using Kitty as the terminal app, see terminal bell
i.e.
open ~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
and uncomment/set the following lines:
enable_audio_bell no
#optional, flashes screen.
visual_bell_duration 0.5