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Whenever I access Terminal and press Command ⌘ + Delete ⌫ my screen flashes white.

It also happens when Chrome's Command ⌘ + F returns no results.

Have I somehow messed up my settings?

I already verified that Universal Access » Hearing » Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs was unchecked. I've tried toggling the setting and still get the flash animation.

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3
  • Some things you can do to try and isolate the issue is reboot in safe mode (shift key) to test. Also make a new user and log out of the broken user and into the new user to see if it's something local to your account. Good luck hunting this down. If you do - go ahead and answer it with what you found. It might be something unique that we can't reproduce well.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 16:02
  • 2
    I am having the same problem. I think it's an issue to do with the alert sounds. If you go to the Sound > Sound Effects menu, and click on any of the alert sounds, nothing plays. The Universal Access panel knows that you're not hearing anything so resorts to flashing the screen as an override. I think this is something to do with SoundFlower as I uninstalled that just before this problem began manifesting itself.
    – user20095
    Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 0:11
  • 1
    I wanted to enable the screen flashing on bell on this work Mac, but couldn't remember how I've enabled it in the past. So even though this post is asking the opposite question, it still answered mine. Have an upvote!
    – Garrett Albright
    Commented Oct 21, 2013 at 21:32

10 Answers 10

Reset to default
74

As discovered by corwin.amber in another post, the problem sometimes lies with a dead coreaudiod and can be fixed with:

sudo killall coreaudiod

(Note--coreaudiod will restart by itself, immediately, after you do this.)

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5
  • 2
    I can note that this seems more frequent if you use external audio. I personally use the DisplayPort for my audio out to a sound system hooked up through my monitor, and have seen this issue.
    – jidar
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 2:25
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    As someone above had put it, I had this exact same behavior "If you go to the Sound > Sound Effects menu, and click on any of the alert sounds, nothing plays. The Universal Access panel knows that you're not hearing anything so resorts to flashing the screen as an override." And that killall did the trick for me! And fixed the alert in the pane as well!
    – ROunofF
    Commented Jun 15, 2016 at 19:04
  • For whatever reason, my mac had switched audio device back to the inbuilt MacBook Pro Speakers and started this screen flashing behavior. Switching back to the HDMI speaker device stopped the flashing without killing coreaudiod or rebooting.
    – SeanFromIT
    Commented Jun 22, 2023 at 20:20
  • when I tried without sudo, it said "No matching processes belonging to you were found" but when I included sudo, it worked
    – Blue Raspberry
    Commented Jun 6 at 15:45
  • This still works in macOS Sonoma (14.5).
    – Jason Sims
    Commented Jul 29 at 12:58
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+50

This sounds ridiculously simple, but it has worked for me in the past. Try checking and then unchecking Universal Access » Hearing » Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs -- this really sounds like that is the behavior in question, and sometimes setting it and the unsetting it resets to the desired behavior. (Note, this might be under Audio in newer versions of Mac OS.)

This basically checks that the preference file can be written to have a no then a yes and will clear up all sorts of minor issues in how apps can store preferences. The next step is to delete (or move to the desktop) the preference file for the affected application. In this case, the system stores this flash preference here:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess.plist

At this point, you might need to expand to see if rebooting, trying a new user account helps isolate the issue.

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4
  • Restarted. It works now lol.
    – carlos
    Commented Sep 21, 2011 at 16:03
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    @carlos, if the answer helps, please mark it as accepted so others can benefit.
    – Dan
    Commented Sep 22, 2011 at 10:14
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    Location/Wording changed over the years: Now (Catalina) it's in System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Audio
    – d4Rk
    Commented Jan 9, 2020 at 8:59
  • Looks like doing this added the previously-nonexistent key flashScreen to com.apple.universalaccess.plist, which might explain what the issue was before (perhaps if the key didn't exist, macOS defaulted to flashing).
    – ijoseph
    Commented May 23, 2022 at 17:57
10

Restart. This happens to me periodically. Restarting always fixes it.

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3
  • Unfortunately, that seems to be the only thing that fixes it for me too.
    – Julian
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 18:22
  • Restarting fixes this for me intermittently.
    – Nick Woodhams
    Commented Oct 9, 2016 at 22:48
  • Again the default fix: "Did you try turn it off and on again?"
    – d4Rk
    Commented Jan 9, 2020 at 11:47
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Reposting here from another post as suggested by David Wolever.

In a similar situation, I was about to give up and reboot, but then I found that restarting the audio daemon resolves the issue:

sudo killall coreaudiod

The symptom was: in the "Sound Effects" system setting panel, selecting alert sounds didn't do anything (usually it triggers a preview of the selected effect). My guess is that OS X fails to play an alert sound, and falls back to the visual cue.

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  • 1
    sudo killall coreaudiod is the solution of one/third of my macOS problems.. 😤; another third is solved with sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder; sleep 2; 🙄
    – Kamafeather
    Commented Apr 9, 2021 at 18:02
6 
rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess.plist

This will fix it every time. Maybe someday apple will fix the bug that keeps corrupting com.apple.universalaccess.plist.

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4
  • OS X 10.8.5 does not have a ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess.plist. Is there an equivalent file of another name?
    – Scott
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 23:12
  • @Scott I am on 10.8.5 and I have it
    – user193130
    Commented Oct 1, 2014 at 23:12
  • Does not work for me, 10.10.5 (14F27)
    – Ian Vaughan
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 9:58
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    Worked for me on 10.10.4
    – TiMESPLiNTER
    Commented Sep 17, 2015 at 13:22
5

Uncheck the 'visual bell' box in the preferences for your terminal style.

Terminals->Preferences->Profiles->Advanced:

Bell: Audible bell Visual bell <>

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4

Aware this is an old thread, but today I realized this was happening since updating to Mac OS Catalina, so hopefully, this can help others.

user20095's comment above helped me to solve it.

In Sound > Sound Effects, the output device for alerts (HDMI monitor) was set differently to my main audio output (Headphone port). As this selected output was muted, no alert sounds were playing, therefore Mac OS defaulted to flashing the screen - even though the screen flash option was unchecked in Accessibility.

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    Thank you! OMG this was driving me insane, and this was the fix for me. I never even realized it was possible to output effects differently from, um, "Output". Go figure.
    – Brian Moeskau
    Commented Jan 9, 2020 at 19:54
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You can turn it off in System Preferences > Accessibility > Audio > Flash screen

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  • Works for Catalina 👌
    – d4Rk
    Commented Jan 9, 2020 at 8:58
  • this should be the chosen answer.
    – Arturo
    Commented Jun 15 at 15:03
  • But if it's already off (which is sometimes the case), you'll need to do this instead: sudo killall coreaudiod
    – Jason Sims
    Commented Jul 29 at 13:05
0

Could have to do with your audio alert set-up. This worked for me in OS X Mavericks. Under apple > preferences > assessability > audio: uncheck "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs".

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1
  • Welcome to Ask Different! This is a duplicate answer but with a different way of accessing the option in a newer version of OS X. To clarify someone else's answer, use the 'edit' or 'improve this answer' button below the post that you wish to edit.
    – grg ♦
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 20:09
0

Checking and then unchecking Universal Access » Hearing » Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs works pretty well. Seems there is some bug. Apple need to solve this issue.

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