John H Palmieri <John.H.Palmieri.2(a)nd.edu&gt; writes: Not. That's probably because `describe-key' and friends use `princ' to print the symbol. `princ' does not print delimiters around strings. If you want delimiters, you should use `prin1'. Output of `describe-key' is not intended to be read back to the reader, so the difference between `princ' and `prin1' should not matter. [...] That's a feature which you can turn off by setting `retry-undefined-key-binding-unshifted' to nil. However, I find globally setting this to nil annoying, as it makes pressing shift-space beep because "Sh-SPC is not defined". I'm not sure if it can be turned on or off as a per-keymap property. I don't know how FSFmacs behaves wrt retrying keys unshifted.