Global key bindings in Emacs (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Sun, 14 Sep 2014

Global key bindings in Emacs

Global key bindings in emacs. What's hard about that, right? Just something simple like

(global-set-key "\C-m" 'newline-and-indent)
and you're all set.

Well, no. global-set-key gives you a nice key binding that works ... until the next time you load a mode that wants to redefine that key binding out from under you.

For many years I've had a huge collection of mode hooks that run when specific modes load. For instance, python-mode defines \C-c\C-r, my binding that normally runs revert-buffer, to do something called run-python. I never need to run python inside emacs -- I do that in a shell window. But I fairly frequently want to revert a python file back to the last version I saved. So I had a hook that ran whenever python-mode loaded to override that key binding and set it back to what I'd already set it to:

(defun reset-revert-buffer ()
  (define-key python-mode-map "\C-c\C-r" 'revert-buffer) )
(setq python-mode-hook 'reset-revert-buffer)

That worked fine -- but you have to do it for every mode that overrides key bindings and every binding that gets overridden. It's a constant chase, where you keep needing to stop editing whatever you wanted to edit and go add yet another mode-hook to .emacs after chasing down which mode is causing the problem. There must be a better solution.

A web search quickly led me to the StackOverflow discussion Globally override key bindings. I tried the techniques there; but they didn't work.

It took a lot of help from the kind folks on #emacs, but after an hour or so they finally found the key: emulation-mode-map-alists. It's only barely documented -- the key there is "The “active” keymaps in each alist are used before minor-mode-map-alist and minor-mode-overriding-map-alist" -- and there seem to be no examples anywhere on the web for how to use it. It's a list of alists mapping names to keymaps. Oh, clears it right up! Right?

Okay, here's what it means. First you define a new keymap and add your bindings to it:

(defvar global-keys-minor-mode-map (make-sparse-keymap)
  "global-keys-minor-mode keymap.")

(define-key global-keys-minor-mode-map "\C-c\C-r" 'revert-buffer)
(define-key global-keys-minor-mode-map (kbd "C-;") 'insert-date)

Now define a minor mode that will use that keymap. You'll use that minor mode for basically everything.

(define-minor-mode global-keys-minor-mode
  "A minor mode so that global key settings override annoying major modes."
  t "global-keys" 'global-keys-minor-mode-map)

(global-keys-minor-mode 1)

Now build an alist consisting of a list containing a single dotted pair: the name of the minor mode and the keymap.

;; A keymap that's supposed to be consulted before the first
;; minor-mode-map-alist.
(defconst global-minor-mode-alist (list (cons 'global-keys-minor-mode
                                              global-keys-minor-mode-map)))

Finally, set emulation-mode-map-alists to a list containing only the global-minor-mode-alist.

(setf emulation-mode-map-alists '(global-minor-mode-alist))

There's one final step. Even though you want these bindings to be global and work everywhere, there is one place where you might not want them: the minibuffer. To be honest, I'm not sure if this part is necessary, but it sounds like a good idea so I've kept it.

(defun my-minibuffer-setup-hook ()
  (global-keys-minor-mode 0))
(add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook 'my-minibuffer-setup-hook)

Whew! It's a lot of work, but it'll let me clean up my .emacs file and save me from endlessly adding new mode-hooks.

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[ 16:46 Sep 14, 2014    More linux/editors | permalink to this entry | ]

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