1.3 Mode line status

When enabled, Flymake displays its status in the mode line, which provides a visual summary of diagnostic collection. It may also hint at certain exceptional situations encountered when communicating with backends.

The following statuses are defined:

[nerrors nwarnings ...]Normal operation. nerrors and nwarnings are, respectively, the total number of errors and warnings found during the last buffer check, for all backends. They may be followed by other totals for other types of diagnostics (see Customizing Flymake error types).
WaitSome Flymake backends haven’t reported since the last time they where questioned. It is reasonable to assume that this is a temporary delay and Flymake will resume normal operation soon.
!All the configured Flymake backends have disabled themselves: Flymake cannot annotate the buffer and action from the user is needed to investigate and remedy the situation (see Troubleshooting).
?There are no applicable Flymake backends for this buffer, thus Flymake cannot annotate it. To fix this, a user may look to extending Flymake and add a new backend (see Extending Flymake).

If you would like to customize the appearance of the mode-line, you can use the variables flymake-mode-line-format and flymake-mode-line-counter-format for that purpose. See Customizable variables.