Silence Cocoa error beep

Question

I have a Cocoa application that captures keypresses through a custom view in the view hierarchy. This view implements the keyUp and keyDown methods, and the keypresses are received. Even so, Cocoa still insists on playing the system error sound/ding every time I press a key. Any solutions?

Note: Although I tried to make this view first responder, it didn't work. That may have something to do with it.

Answer 1

If you have unsuccessfully tried to make the view the first responder, it's most likely because NSView returns NO for acceptsFirstResponder. You can have your NSView subclass override acceptsFirstResponder to return YES:

- (BOOL)acceptsFirstResponder {
    return YES;
}

That should eliminate the beeps. Alternatively, you could have the NSView subclass override NSResponder's performKeyEquivalent: method to return YES, which should also eliminate the NSBeeps:

- (BOOL)performKeyEquivalent:(NSEvent *)event {
    return YES;
}

UPDATE:

Not sure what to suggest. I actually wrote a "Keyboard Cleaner Helper" app that's designed to basically do something similar to what you want. (I used it on my laptop when I wanted to clean the keyboard and didn't the hundreds of key presses to randomly rename files or result in repeated error beeps).

Sample project: http://www.markdouma.com/developer/KeyboardCleanerHelper.zip

Running that app, I can't get it to beep at all (notice calls are logged to Console).