unbind keys in Emacs

tags

global-unset-key and local-unset-key are useful, but it’s worth having an answer to this question that points out that the general way to unbind a key (for any keymap) is to define a binding of nil:

(define-key KEYMAP KEY nil)
;; example
(define-key python-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-v") nil)
(global-unset-key (kbd "C-c C-v"));; unset python mode map

If you follow the code for either of those other functions, you’ll notice that this is exactly what they do.