I do not think Mac OS X has a TERMCAP database. I think it only uses terminfo. Then again, emacs may be using termcap in a generic sense.
Personally I build my own editor (which for me happens to be Vim; please don't hold it against me).
If you are a hardcore emacs user, I would suggets either building your own version with the options you prefer, or finding one of the pre-build versions which has build-in Mac OS X GUI support (or even build-in X11 support). Google is your friend here.
Apple is not really into the traditional text editors, so they tend to leave a lot of the good stuff out.
I can currently access only one 10.6 Mac, but I did clean install of Snow Leopard on it.
The source code of open source softwares installed in 10.6.2 can be found in [Mac OS X 10.6.2 - Source|http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1062>. Emacs is in [emacs-78.2|http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-78.2>, which contains emacs-21.1. So I guess OP's emacs is not the one preinstalled in 10.6.
Thanks Jun (and others as well). Your response does show me that something is messed up with my system. I may have upgraded my Emacs at one point under 10.5.x, and those updates got only partially propagated when I upgraded to 10.6. For the most part, I'm a vim user myself, but I've been trying to "broaden my horizons" 🙂 and learn Emacs. I have many other options, including the Cocoa native GUI version of Emacs. I was mostly just curious, and seeing Jun's response helps me see, like I said before, that something is messed up with my Emacs installation. I hope nobody wastes any more time digging into this.
Just for grins, I will post for the record a couple of observations:
For some reason, I also have an emacs-i386 file, but the other three files are identical size to Juns' files:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/
emacsls -l /usr/bin/
emacs -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 26135456 Aug 1 00:50 /usr/bin/emacs
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 13072480 Aug 13 09:57 /usr/bin/emacs-i386
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7802784 Aug 1 00:50 /usr/bin/emacs-undumped
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 105216 Aug 1 00:50 /usr/bin/emacsclient
And this is really wierd:
$ /usr/bin/emacs -version
GNU Emacs 22.1.1
$ which emacs
/usr/bin/emacs
Okay, so just typing emacs should execute /usr/bin/emacs, right?
$ emacs -version
GNU Emacs 23.1.50.1
...
Well, that's wierd. Maybe something in my environment (i.e. .bash_profile)?
$ bash -norc
$ emacs -version
GNU Emacs 22.1.1
...
It would appear so. For posterity's sake, I'll post a follow-up if I find out what it is.
Well, shucks, I found out what the problem was. Somewhere in the past I read that one way to "update emacs" was to install the Cocao GUI application, and then add the following alias to my environment:
alias emacs='/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw --debug-init'
which did not work, but I neglected to remove from my .bash_profile.
Unfortunately, /usr/bin/which does not show aliased commands (I'm used to Solaris, which if I remember correctly, would have said something like "aliased to '/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs -nw --debug-init'"). So, this did not show up.
Removing the above alias from my .bash_profile fixed the problem.
Okay, so just typing emacs should execute /usr/bin/emacs, right?
Bash does not have builtin "which"; it just calls external command /usr/bin/which. But of course external command knows nothing about your alias. Instead, please use "type" builtin: "type emacs" etc.
