How to mute the Windows Terminal bell 🔕

2 min readMar 25, 2021

Microsoft’s releases of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Windows Terminal were causes for much excitement as they signified Microsoft’s commitment to improving the developer experience on Windows. There is still much to be desired from both products, but they have already significantly improved the developer experience on Windows.

Windows Terminal showing “Hello, world!” in Vim

One of the issues I have with Windows Terminal is the annoying sound that gets triggered when I hit a text or navigation boundary using the tab, backspace, or arrow keys. Apparently, that sound is a bell, and it is left on by default. To disable it, I followed the short steps outline below.

1. Open the Windows Terminal settings

1.1. Click the down (🔽) button next to the last open tab to reveal a menu of shells, settings, and other options.

1.2. Click the Settings (⚙) option to edit the Windows Terminal settings

Windows Terminal with dropdown menu showing steps to click the Settings option

2. Set the `bellStyle` property to `"none"`

2.1. Add/edit the bellStyle property to have a value of "none"

The bellStyle property can be added/edited on individual shell profiles configured in profiles.list[], but it can also be applied to all shells by setting profiles.defaults.bellStyle to a value of "none". The latter is shown in the image below.

2.2. Save your settings and restart Windows Terminal to ensure the settings take effect