Remove all leader mappings before creating my own

Question

The question pretty much sums it up: Is there a way to clear all of the <leader> mappings set by plugin authors before proceeding to set my own custom mappings?

The only way I've seen to do this is to remove them individually with an autocmd or in the after/ directory, but I'd like to remove them all in one go without ever having to worry about it again, regardless of the plugins I may add in the future.

Answer 1

You can use maplist() to get a list of mappings; this returns a list with information about every custom mapping.

You can see the exact list of properties it returns in :help maplist(); the one important for us here is lhs ("left hand side"), which is the key mapping. For example for nnoremap <Leader>tc … it's set to '\ts', assuming that <Leader> is the default of \ (<Leader> is expanded when used, so it shows up as a backslash).

To unmap everything, you can use something like:

for m in maplist()
    if m.lhs[0] == '\'
        echo printf('unmap %s', m.lhs)
        exe 'unmap' .. m.lhs
    endif
endfor

Note that this doesn't necessarily truly remove all mappings, because some plugins may define buffer-specific mappings from an autocmd which will be applied every time a buffer is loaded. Unsetting those would be complex and error-prone, but you can run the above in your autocmd (although that would also remove your own mappings). In general it's probably a better strategy to configure the specific plugins, many have some sort of setting to prevent defining any mappings (and if they don't, creating a patch is usually easy, and thus far everyone I've sent a patch for this has accepted it).