Mysterious, unstoppable alert sounds

Help
1

I’m getting alert sounds in urxvt that I can’t seem to turn off.

here’s what I’ve tried:

  • xset -b
  • xset b off
  • having set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc
  • turning on visual bell in urxvt (this actually works, but hurts my eyes)

what are my options here?

The wild thing is… I believe I turned off the pc speaker bell at some point… now the bell is an audio file! I never set that up (intentionally)! it’s a drip sound. I can’t find anything about alert sounds or bells in the nixos settings, and I have no idea what piece of software is enabling it.

Any ideas? <3 <3 <3

ps. another option would be to tone down the visual bell. can I choose the color of it?!

1 Like
2

Has anyone resolved this issue? I’ve tried adding gtk-error-bell=0 to all my gtk configs like this stack exchange post suggests here, but nevertheless it persists. I am going insane please help me my family is dying.

3

If you use Pipewire, perhaps try pipewire: 0.3.63 -> 0.3.63 by r-ryantm · Pull Request #207895 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

2 Likes
4

Have you been able to resolve this? I’m having the same issue and now it has spread to firefox ‘find in page’ tool

5

Did you try the config linked in the previous comment?

6

No because i had a moment and realized it happened only after i open vim, so i set vim_configurable.costumize { vimrcConfig.customRC = "set belloff=all ..." ...} and it stopped happening

7

setting

/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-custom.conf
# the quotes are not required
{
   "context.properties": {
       "module.x11.bell": false 
   }
}

and restarting pipewire (systemctl --user restart pipewire.service) to test works
as suggested in the GitHub comment but is there I way I can get this into my pipewire block in my configuration.nix?

8

In unstable there is services.pipewire.extraConfig.pipewire

1 Like
9

ah, of course! Thanks

10

Awesome. Until then:

{ pkgs, ... }:
let json = pkgs.formats.json { };
in
{
  environment.etc = {
    "pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-silent-bell.conf".source =
      json.generate "99-silent-bell.conf" {
        "context.properties" = {
          "module.x11.bell" = false;
        };
      };
  };
}
11

The bell is still going nowhere for me, I can still hear it when I open the system logout menu or when I search a non-existent text in Firefox.

I tried putting this in my services.pipewire section in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

    # Disable the annoying system bell
    # Every item in this attrset becomes a separate drop-in file in /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d
    extraConfig.pipewire = {
      "99-disable-bell" = {
        context.properties = { module.x11.bell = false; };
      };
    };

It generates the file /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-disable-bell.conf with contents

{
  "context": {
    "properties": {
      "module": {
        "x11": {
          "bell": false
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The bell is still there after a reboot.

I also tried endgame’s solution of generating pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-silent-bell.conf directly, but that’s no longer allowed in NixOS 24.05.

EDIT: Oh and xset b off also doesn’t work.

12

You need to put quotes around the properties you don’t want to nest in the file, like so

    extraConfig.pipewire = {
     "99-disable-bell" = {
       "context.properties"= {
            "module.x11.bell" = false;
       };
     };
    };
  };

That creates a file that looks like

  "context.properties": {
    "module.x11.bell": false
  }
}

After doing that and running systemctl --user restart pipewire.service , my system is back to sanity

13

Thanks, that did the trick!