Eask can’t find the Emacs executable

[TinaRussell]

I installed Eask via snap, verified the installation with eask --version (version 0.12.10), and, after navigating to my project’s directory, ran eask init and got this error:

Emacs is not installed (cannot find `emacs' executable)

(The output is the same whether or not I use the --verbose 4 and --debug options.)

This is strange, since Emacs runs if I run emacs at the command line, the executable is in one of the directories listed in my $PATH and everything. Specifically, since I built Emacs from source, the Emacs executable is in /usr/local/bin. Is Eask looking in the wrong place? I’m not sure what is going on. Any help is appreciated! I’m running Emacs 30.2.50 on Ubuntu 24.04 on a ThinkPad P53.

[jcs090218]

My best guess is something related to snap since I have several users also having trouble using Eask installed via snap. 🤔

For a workaround, can you try setting the environment variable EASK_EMACS? See https://emacs-eask.github.io/Getting-Started/Finding-Emacs/ for more info! :D

[TinaRussell]

Hmm, okay. I tried, first, EASK_EMACS=emacs eask init (just to see what would happen), and got the same result. Then I tried EASK_EMACS=/usr/local/bin/emacs eask init and got the following result:

Emacs is not installed (cannot find `/usr/local/bin/emacs' executable)

So, yeah, this definitely seems like a problem with the snap. I could try installing it via deb instead, but I’m a little nervous because of how the instructions specify to use sudo apt update --allow-insecure-repositories and sudo apt install eask-cli --allow-unauthenticated… is there an issue with the GPG key used in the instructions? (And, of course, the other options would be to install it via NPM, or Nix, etc. but I’m wary of managing another package manager on my computer 😅 I know, I’m picky, but that’s why I’m a Linux user 😉)

[jcs090218]

Hmm, okay. I tried, first, EASK_EMACS=emacs eask init (just to see what would happen), and got the same result.

Yeah, that's pretty strange. :(

I'll keep an eye on this but I'm not sure how to solve this yet... 😓

I could try installing it via deb instead, but I’m a little nervous because of how the instructions specify to use sudo apt update --allow-insecure-repositories and sudo apt install eask-cli --allow-unauthenticated… is there an issue with the GPG key used in the instructions? (And, of course, the other options would be to install it via NPM, or Nix, etc. but I’m wary of managing another package manager on my computer 😅 I know, I’m picky, but that’s why I’m a Linux user 😉)

That's understandable! I provided the deb install as an option, and I should have tried publishing to apt, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Anyway, I personally use NPM and Nix, and both of them work great. 😀