How to turn off the beep only in bash tab-complete

Question

I find the beep useful for some things, so I only want to turn it off for tab completion (I'm not asking how to completely turn it off, that has already been answered in a different question on Serverfault). I also don't have root access, working on RHEL5.

score 104 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 27 '20 at 08:35

104

Readline library has bell-style variable:

Controls what happens when Readline wants to ring the terminal bell. If set to ‘none’, Readline never rings the bell. If set to ‘visible’, Readline uses a visible bell if one is available. If set to ‘audible’ (the default), Readline attempts to ring the terminal’s bell.

So you can put into your ~/.inputrc file following line:

 set bell-style none

Next, run bind -f ~/.inputrc once to load it.

edited Nov 27 '20 at 08:35

Asclepius

426

answered Apr 25 '13 at 23:12

Nykakin

3,979

7

If you want this setup to be default for all users of the system, you can edit /etc/inputrc config file with root user. – Can Kavaklıoğlu Aug 12 '15 at 08:28
2

then run bind -f ~/.inputrc to reload it. – wisbucky Jun 17 '20 at 17:14
Thank you, SO much!! I was nearing the point of projectile reconfiguration of my system (throwing my laptop across the room). – cycollins Nov 16 '23 at 06:50

score 30 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 17 '20 at 17:18

30

If you don't want to create and maintain a separate ~/.inputrc file, you can also just add this line to ~/.bashrc:

bind 'set bell-style none'

Then source ~/.bashrc to reload it.

answered Jun 17 '20 at 17:18

wisbucky

3,388

2

This is the ONLY solution that worked for me (although "visible" option doesn't work). Even disabling Critical Stop and Default Beep Windows sounds didn't work (using WSL in ConEmu). – Moos Jan 10 '21 at 19:50

score 17 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 25 '13 at 19:07

I'm not aware of any way to disable the tab completion bell in bash (aside from disabling the bell entirely or changing it to the subjectively-more-annoying visual bell).

You could try set show-all-if-ambiguous on in your ~/.inputrc - this makes the shell show the list of matching commands/items immediately when you hit tab instead of waiting for you to hit tab twice.
A side effect is that there is no bell before the candidate matches are shown.

score 8 · Answer 4 · answered May 02 '13 at 20:17

8

In ~/.inputrc, there exists the following possibility, but it didn't do anything for me. It just rings the bell. This may be a bug in the Cygwin bash.

set bell-style visible

answered May 02 '13 at 20:17

Mark Lakata

864

How to turn off the beep only in bash tab-complete

4 Answers4