I really like using screen, but there's one thing that has really been bugging me. when i backspace too much, like when there's nothing on a line and i hit backspace, the screen flashes white(or whatever the text color is). I often just hold backspace until i have a clear line if i make a mistake, and the screen flashing just kinda hurts my eyes and i'd like to stop this behavior.

Anybody know what i'm talking about? or how to fix it? it happens when i'm using screen in console(like runlevel 2,3, etc.) and when running screen in an x terminal emulator.

Its called visible bell or visual bell. I'm not sure how to turn it off in general, but in an xterm you can bring up the VT options menu (ctrl-middle-mouse-button) and uncheck enable visual bell or in your ~/.Xdefaults file set it to off and in screen C-a C-g toggles it.

visual bell huh? i've never seen it when i'm just using a regular shell. i have had the system speaker beep at me when i over-backspace. had to disable the system speaker on one of my computers. i'll look into disabling the visual bell in screen. thanks.

ok so i looked around and c-a c-g did the trick for changing from visual to audible bell. now the screen doesn't flash and since i don't have a system speaker i don't hear anything. i'd really like to turn off these bells altogether.

Well you could use ctrl-u to clear the line instead of backspaces, that would certainly cut down on the number of 'bells' going off

The feature is called "visual bell".

here are applicable properties you can set in your ~/.screenrc file

vbell_msg "bell: window ~%" # Message for visual bell
vbellwait 2 # Seconds to pause the screen for visual bell
vbell off # Turns visual bell off