flycheck don't run in emacs-lisp-mode

Question

In emacs-lisp-mode, flycheck cannot run. If execute M-x flycheck-select-checker RET emacs-lisp RET, Emacs tells message below:

Syntax checker in buffer example.el in emacs-lisp-mode:

  emacs-lisp (disabled)
    - major mode: `emacs-lisp-mode' supported
    - may enable: Automatically disabled!
    - predicate:  t
    - executable: Not found

Flycheck cannot use this syntax checker for this buffer.

Flycheck Mode is disabled.  Use C-u M-x flycheck-disable-checker to
enable disabled checkers.

--------------------

Flycheck version: 32snapshot
Emacs version:    26.1
System:           i686-w64-mingw32
Window system:    w32

How can I do to fix it?

Answer 1

I had exactly the same issue with Emacs 26.1 and Flycheck running on Windows. Flycheck wasn't able to find emacs.exe, even when I pointed flycheck-emacs-lisp-executable directly at it in my init.el.

To check whether it was a compatibility issue, I reinstalled my tried-and-true version of Emacs 25.3.1. Flycheck was successfully able to detect emacs.exe and lint Lisp in both emacs-lisp-mode and lisp-interaction-mode.

This suggests there are compatibility issues between Flycheck and Emacs 26.1 (at least for Windows, which Flycheck doesn't fully support).

As additional info, Flycheck was successfully working successfully with javascript-eslint on 26.1 for me. I only tested with Lisp and Javascript, but it was interesting to see that Flycheck was working for some things.

If you need Flycheck for Lisp, I'd recommend switching to version 25.3.1 of Emacs until this can be resolved.

Hope this helps.