alsa-project/alsa-utils issue #255 was edited from Porkepix: When in an environment not intercepting those keys (usually managed by your compositor/window manager), upon receiving some keycodes such as volume up or down, alsamixer is exiting and writing the UTF-8 keycode inside the terminal while it shouldn't. Examples: Mute key > 440u Volume down key > 438u Volume up key > 439u Curiously enough, the microphone mute one doesn't do anything. These should at the very least not exit alsamixer. A bonus would be, when they're not intercepted, to actually use them to apply mutes and volumes up/down. EDIT: Terminal here is Alacritty as that behavior might change with others eg. if they're not sending any key codes over to what's running. Issue URL : https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-utils/issues/255 Repository URL: https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-utils