set beep

Synopsis

/set beep [on|off|toggle]

Default: on. With no value, set displays the current value. toggle reverses it; other values are rejected as invalid boolean settings.

Description

Controls EPIC's terminal bell routine. When off, calls through that routine do not emit a terminal bell, including the beep command, bells encountered during normal full-screen output, and window beep_always notifications. When on, those paths can request a bell, subject to other output controls.

This setting does not convert Control-G (^G, BEL) into a visible G. Normal display normalization preserves BEL unless unprintable characters are being stripped; the terminal output path consumes it as a bell request rather than displaying a glyph. Turning beep off suppresses that request without inserting replacement text.

The separate historical beep_on_msg and beep_when_away settings are not present in the current built-in variable table. Scripts can implement their own notification policies, but a script calling the built-in beep command still uses this setting.

Limits and interactions

The terminal routine also respects an internal bell-permission flag, which EPIC disables while repainting window contents. Turning beep on therefore does not make every redraw ring again. Bell characters removed by output mangling or output suppression cannot reach the normal display bell path.

For hidden windows, beep_always can request a bell and produce a local Beep in window N notification. Turning this global setting off silences the terminal-bell call; it does not itself cancel the hidden-window notification text.

EPIC emits the terminal's bel capability. Whether this becomes a sound, visual flash, notification, or nothing depends on the terminal emulator and its configuration. In dumb mode, ordinary text is printed directly to standard output rather than through the full-screen bell parser, so embedded BEL characters in that text are not filtered by this setting. The explicit beep command still uses the gated terminal routine.

Changing the setting affects subsequent bell requests and sends no IRC request.

Example

Disable EPIC's terminal-bell routine:

/set beep off
/beep

The second command does not emit a bell through that routine. Re-enable it with /set beep on.

Source references

• source/term.c: term_beep checks beep and internal bell permission before emitting bel.
• source/screen.c: normalizes BEL, handles display bell requests and hidden-window notifications, suppresses bells during repainting, and has a direct-output dumb-mode path.
• source/commands.c: beepcmd calls term_beep.
• source/vars.c and include/config.h: boolean registration and default on.