How do I set up key bindings for modes in a specific Evil state?

Question

I have a set of key bindings that I use for both web-mode and php-mode in insert mode (of Evil). So I cannot use set-local-map or something. Because in normal mode, the same keys will then call other commands. So the bindings need to be active in evil-insert-state-map only.

I have the following:

(eval-after-load 'php-mode
  '(progn
     (define-key evil-insert-state-map
       (kbd "C-<next>") (lambda () (interactive) (insert " = ")))
     (define-key evil-insert-state-map
       (kbd "C-<prior>") (lambda () (interactive) (insert "->")))))

(eval-after-load 'web-mode
  '(progn
     (define-key evil-insert-state-map
       (kbd "C-<next>") 'zencoding-expand-yas) 
     (define-key evil-insert-state-map
       (kbd "C-<prior>") 'zencoding-expand-line)))

So every time web-mode or php-mode is being loaded, these key bindings will be activated.

The problem is: Suppose I have two open buffers, one in the php-mode and the other in web-mode. When the web-mode buffer is the current buffer and I switch to an another buffer which's in php-mode, the web-mode bindings are still active inside the php-mode buffer.

I tried to solve this problem by using (add-hook 'web-mode-hook [...]) and (add-hook 'php-mode-hook [...]) instead of setting up the bindings in eval-after-load. But that solution doesn't work in this situation.

Any suggestions? I would really appreciate it.

Answer 1

Evil has the evil-define-key macro for defining commands for certain states in a specific keymap only:

(evil-define-key 'insert emacs-lisp-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-c") 'butterfly
                                             (kbd "<pause>") 'zone)

It is able to delay the execution of the binding (by using eval-after-load itself) and can also take more than one key-command pair which is a pretty nifty addition.