As Assem noted, there are extra spaces in your code that prevent remove from being mishandled.
Please note that both delete and remove work for such purposes, if the list items can be correctly compared using equal , which is used for both of them. If you want to compare using eq instead, use the delq or remq .
The main differences between delete and remove (or delq and remq respectively) are that delete deletes this element by side effect, i.e. modifies the given list in place, and remove does not return, but returns a copy of this list with the deleted item.
(setq list1 '("foo" "bar" "baz")) (setq list2 (remove "bar" list1)) (message "list1: %s" list1) (message "list2: %s" list2) (setq list3 (delete "bar" list1)) (message "list1: %s" list1) (message "list3: %s" list3)
If you evaluate the code above, in the *Message* buffer you will find the following output:
list1: (foo bar baz) list2: (foo baz) list1: (foo baz) list3: (foo baz)
As you can see, after calling remove on list1 it has not changed. But after you wrote delete on it, it has changed.