Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug and the precise symptoms of the bug: One of the emacs' selling point is ability to rebind the keyboard to suit the editor for non-us layout. Based on the hints from #emacs users, I tried to bind C-š to C-a, i.e. added the following line to my ~/.emacs: (global-set-key (kbd "C-š") 'move-beginning-of-line) If I ask help on C-a, C-h k C-a says: It is bound to C-a, C-š, . However, C-h k C-š says: C-š is undefined. By reporting the issue in #emacs, i got help from 'fledermaus' who told me the problem is: "there are two differnet internal representations, and they are not being used consistently." Moreover he hinted me to report "(kbd "C-š") is generating one vector for the key, which shows up when getting the help from the function, but actually pressing the key in X generates a different vector." We went further th proof the problem: M-: (kbd "š") RET evaluates to: [331937] By modifying ' describe-key' source (credit to fledermaus) with adding the line (fset 'yank-menu (cons 'keymap yank-menu)))))) + (message "KEY: %S" key) (if (numberp untranslated) and issuing: M-x describe-key RET C-š RET evaluates: KEY: [67111225] otoh, M-: (kbd "C-š") RET gives: [67440801] which confirms the problem that "kbd is supposed to be the one thing that tells you the canonical internal representation of any symbolic key representation, which is different to eg. describe-key C-š" and therefore wrong. Please, if someone can take a look on this issue, it's one of big advantages of emacs over vim for non-US users! Sincerely, Gour In GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.10.12) of 2007-06-08 on ovide Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.10400000 configured using `configure '--prefix=/usr' '--sysconfdir=/etc' '--libexecdir=/usr/lib' '--localstatedir=/var' '--mandir=/usr/man' '--without-sound' '-with-x-toolkit=gtk' 'CFLAGS=-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe'' Important settings: value of $LC_ALL: nil value of $LC_COLLATE: nil value of $LC_CTYPE: en_US.UTF-8 value of $LC_MESSAGES: en_US.UTF-8 value of $LC_MONETARY: nil value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil value of $LC_TIME: en_US.UTF-8 value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8 default-enable-multibyte-characters: t Major mode: Emacs-Lisp Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t utf-translate-cjk-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: identity