How to turn off the beep/bell sound in zsh
A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Linux OS to Ubuntu 18.04 (from 16.04). I did a clean install and overall it’s been nice - some function keys that didn’t work before now work great out of the box! However, one thing that’s annoyed me is the *beep* sounds that the shell makes (both Bash and zsh).
Fixing this in Bash was easy enough with a quick search. I found this page from 2013 that asked me to put set bell-style none in my /etc/inputrc or my ~/.inputrc.
However, fixing this in zsh (which is my default shell) was harder than it should have been for some reason so I thought I’d document it (tl; dr below). Surprisingly, all my searches weren’t giving me anything. I did learn that zsh doesn’t read inputrc files and so my above fix wouldn’t work. I was mostly searching for how to turn off the beeps when tabbing through the autocomplete listing. I did find this comment on a Unix StackExchange question that said it was possible in zsh but didn’t say how (relevant xkcd). Some days later when I searched for it again, I found some obscure reference to LIST_BEEP and HIST_BEEP on this page from 2005 and a suggestion to look them up in the zsh manual. The next time I searched for these things (query: “zbeep hist_beep list_beep”), the first result was the same page from 2005 (ouch, bad sign) and the second result was a gzipped PostScript version of the zsh manual. I downloaded it but did not open it just then (and found out later that I wasn’t able to search inside the PostScript file anyway for some reason). And then finally, on a site called bash2zsh.com I found this PDF which gave me the answer.
zsh options can be set with setopt and unset with unsetopt. The option BEEP toggles whether zsh beeps on all errors. The option HIST_BEEP toggles whether zsh beeps when going beyond history. And the option LIST_BEEP toggles beeps on ambigious completion.
I finally ended up adding the following lines to my .zshrc:
# Turn off all beeps
unsetopt BEEP
# Turn off autocomplete beeps
# unsetopt LIST_BEEP
Oh, sweet silence.
tl; dr
put unsetopt BEEP in your .zshrc