beeps on tab

[Tero Karvinen]

Bash beeps every time user presses tab, often many times for every command line given.

On an office full of Ubuntus, continous beeping is annoying. Tab completition is one of the most used features of bash shell. There is absolutely no point in beeping all the time. Even though this is "just" an interface issue, it is something almost every user wants to change right away.

I suggested changing this in gnome-terminal (Bug #34745), but as noted in gnome bugzilla, it should (also) be changed in bash.

Aoki and others: Debian Reference: 8.6.7 Disable sound (beep)
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-tips.en.html#s8.6.7

Socher: Don't beep at me
http://www.tldp.org/linuxfocus/English/June2005/article378.shtml

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

- you can configure this in /etc/inputrc.
- IMO this should not be done on an application basis,
  you can configure that in the audio preferences to
  not ring the system bell

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

I think system should have sensible defaults. Inputrc config is not possible for non-computer literate users.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

Tero Karvinen schrieb:
> I think system should have sensible defaults. Inputrc config is not possible for non-computer literate users.

right, and therefore it should be configured in gnome-control-center

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Basically you want to get the visual beep option being the default then?

[Manuel López-Ibáñez (manuellopezibanez)]

Speaking for myself, I don't want any beep at all. No visual epilepsy-inducing flickering, no audible disruptive electric discharge, please.

The corresponding bug in KDE is bug 67834.

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

I agree: no beep is the best.

When user presses tab, there is nothing to beep about. Users attention is already on screen. There is no danger at sight. Long operation has not just ended. And there is no point in (beep) telling (beep) the (beep beep) whole office (beep) that user is (beep) using (beep) bash as normal. (beep)

Thank beforehand to whoever fixes this.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you still get the issue in hardy or intrepid?

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

Yes, the issue is present in Hardy.

Disabling the beep is not at all obvious to beginners - many students ask about removing the beep every week.

I have not tested if it's there on Intrepid.

[Chris Pimlott (launchpad-chris)]

I agree strongly with the submitter of this bug. Excessive beeping like this creates a hazard where users become trained to ignore beeps and thus disregard other beeps that provide valuable warnings.

[Adam Johnson (adamcplusplus-johnson)]

I have the same problem here; I spent a good few days trying to find some way to turn off the internal speaker just to get around the issue - except that there isn't a way to do it (even in the BIOS).

It would be nice if there was a global switch in "System > Preferences > Sound" to turn this off. Right now my machine beeps when it shuts down, beeps when I autocomplete, beeps when I run off the top of a man page, beeps all over the place in vim... Lots of beeping. My laptop speaker is pretty beefy too, so the whole neighbourhood can hear my lack of vim experience.

...this wasn't really a problem on my desktop, I just yanked out the mobo connectors. :)

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

Adam: as a bypass, try
 $ sudo rmmod pcspkr
For more info, see links on my initial comment.

This bug seems to affect a lot of users, but there has been no progress in three years...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME)

[Jouni Mettala (jouni-mettala)]

This bug is no more issue in Ubuntu 9.10. Module pcspkr has been disabled by default. No more annoying beeps on tabs. Bug 77010 has more information.