Disclaimer: This code might not work well in all cases, as it wasn’t tested much yet.

This code doesn’t work right as of now when the same key combination is moved to another and then bound to other key. I hope I’ll find a way to make it reliably work.

Utilities for rebinding keys in Emacs

These utilities allow to rebind keys in Emacs in all major modes. Some major modes cause problems because they bind standard keybindings to their own commands, which don’t check if they were rebound in the first place.

One such mode is nxml-mode, which rebinds M-h as nxml-mark-paragraph. This can cause problems when someone rebound M-h in their configuration.

It’s possible to write configuration manually for each major mode to fix these problems, but that takes time and adds boilerplate code which does the same thing, and it makes it harder to maintain changes.

Using these utilities

Rebinding

This repository comes with smart-rebind.el, which defines smart-rebind-keys. It allows to move one standard keybinding from one key to another.

smart-rebind.el provides the feature smart-rebind as well as having magic autoload comments. Use whichever way to load it that fits your needs.

For example, to make C-x C-h do the same thing as M-h (which is bound to mark-paragraph by default):

(smart-rebind-keys "M-h" "C-x C-h")

Binding

smart-bind.el defines smart-bind-key, which allows to make sure that specified key always executes preferred command, and removes keybindings which override it in major modes.

Similarly to smart-rebind.el, this file provides the feature smart-bind. Autoload comments are present in it too.

For example, to make sure that M-h is always bound to backward-kill-word:

(smart-bind-key "M-h" #'backward-kill-word)

Using both utilities at the same time

Each of these utilities adds a hook (at the end of the list of hooks) that are run every time a major mode is changed. This means that the order in which first calls to smart-bind-key and smart-rebind-keys are included in files matters.