Question

Not sure if this is an universal behavior, but at least in GTK/Linux Emacs 23/24, when one makes certain kind of mistakes, the first and last row of the program will flicker – this is, invert their color for a short time.

A simple way of reproducing this is placing the point on the first row of a buffer, and then press Up. One is (conveniently) prompted with the message “Beggining of buffer”, but the mentioned flickering happens as well.

Which I find visually annoying and conceptually, a bit overzealous. Any way to disable it? Is this a feature or a bug?

Answer 1

See variable visible-bell:

Documentation:
Non-nil means try to flash the frame to represent a bell.

See also `ring-bell-function'.

You can customize this variable.