mjhjmtu

I use Nautilus to explore my files. I use a Debian-based OS with KDE Plasma 5.

I use the keyboard a lot. When I press the key up when navigating files, if I'm already at the extremity of the list of files, Nautilus will send a big system beep which I will hear at 100% volume through my headphones. My reaction is comparable to getting electrified.

I have placed the following lines in ~/.bashrc for the sudo (root) user and for my regular desktop user:

# Turn off system beep in console:
xset b off
xset b 0 0 0

However, despite the beep going away from some places in the OS (such as erasing an empty line in the gnome-terminal), it's still in Nautilus. I believe it's because Nautilus doesn't source any of the .bashrc or because it ignores the xset commands.

How do I fix this?

What I need might be at a deeper level than the .bashrc, some file that is executed by everything, but which can still control the sound. Otherwise, disabling the sound another way or replacing it could be interesting.

Short of muting the sound entirely or disconnecting your headphones, there is no system-wide setting for events which will be followed by all applications. In your case especially, since you’re using Nautilus on a KDE system, you’ll run into issues since Nautilus won’t follow your desktop’s configured behaviour.

Nautilus uses GNOME’s settings. If you have the GNOME control centre, you can disable sound effects there — go to the sound settings, and disable sound effects. Alternatively, run dconf-editor, go to “org/gnome/desktop/sound”, and disable “event-sounds” and “input-feedback-sounds”. You can do this from the command line too, see How to turn off alert sounds/sound effects on Gnome from terminal? for details.

I do not know what sound KDE does, but if you mean system beep, just disable loading of the pcspkr module. As root do:

rmmod pcspkr ; echo "blacklist pcspkr" >>/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

The xset command you're using operates on the X server/X session, not the terminal, so .bashrc or similar is not the right place to put it. If Nautilus is really beeping via the X server's bell function, I would expect the xset to stop it, if you've already opened a terminal (and thereby run the command) beforehand.

If that works, what you need to do is get the command run as part of starting/logging in under X. The traditional way to do this is via a .xsession or .xinitrc file; however, these files (scripts) were traditionally expected to run your window manager/desktop environment session program, as the final line via exec, and if you just go dropping in a script containing nothing but xset, you might find yourself unable to login under X (rather, immediately getting logged out when you do). Figuring out the right thing to do here is going to be somewhat specific to the OS/distro's X and desktop environment setup, so I feel like I'm leaving this answer somewhat incomplete, but as a source of direction for where to look.

To mute Gnome alerts:

$ dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/sound/event-sounds "false" 

Equivalently:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.sound event-sounds false