GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
A keymap can inherit the bindings of another keymap. Do do this, make a keymap whose ``tail'' is another existing keymap to inherit from. Such a keymap looks like this:
(keymap bindings... . other-keymap)
The effect is that this keymap inherits all the bindings of other-keymap, whatever they may be at the time a key is looked up, but can add to them or override them with bindings.
If you change the bindings in other-keymap using define-key
or other key-binding functions, these changes are visible in the
inheriting keymap unless shadowed by bindings. The converse is
not true: if you use define-key to change the inheriting keymap,
that affects bindings, but has no effect on other-keymap.
Here is an example showing how to make a keymap that inherits
from text-mode-map:
(setq my-mode-map (cons 'keymap text-mode-map))