Recently I wrote a short article on removing keybindings. Originally I failed to cover there one important nuance there that I’ll tackle today - namely the difference between really removing (unbinding) a keybinding versus just unsetting it (setting it to nil).1 I know what you’re thinking right now - is there really any difference between the two?

Most of the time there’s no real difference and I guess that’s why people often use the terms “remove”, “unbind” and “unset” interchangeably. But they are not the same as there’s a subtle difference when there’s a parent keymap involved. When unsetting a key in a child map (e.g. with define-key), it will still shadow the same key in the parent keymap.2 Removing the binding will allow the key in the parent keymap to be used. That’s why one can argue that unbinding is preferable to unsetting. The only problem with unbinding is that it was kind of hard to do in Emacs until very recently, unless you were relying on third-party packages to do so (e.g. bind-key).

Generally the best way to truly remove a keybinding is probably the new command keymap-unset that will be part of Emacs 29. It can both unset and unbind a keybinding depending on how it’s used:

;; unset a binding
(keymap-unset clojure-mode-map "C-c C-z")

;; remove a binding
(keymap-unset clojure-mode-map "C-c C-z" 'remove)

In the example above clojure-mode-map is a child map of prog-mode-map, as clojure-mode is derived from prog-mode (the standard parent for major modes related to programming languages). If prog-mode-map had some binding for C-c C-z it would not become available if you had only unset the binding in clojure-mode-map. Only removal/unbinding of the keybinding from the child map (clojure-mode-map) would allow you to use the binding in the parent map (prog-mode-map).

By the way, you can use the keymap-unset even on older Emacs version if you install the compat package, that brings newer Emacs functionality (mostly newer APIs) to older Emacs releases.

I hope this article cleared some of the confusion with all the overloaded terminology in the field. That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

  1. Special thanks to Jonas Bernoulli for flagging my omission. ↩

  2. In Emacs one keymap (child) can inherit bindings from another (parent). You can read more about keymap inheritance here. ↩