Re: Relevance of `baud-rate' in the 2020s?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:11:40 -0700
> 
> So there is this nifty variable called `baud-rate'.  It can be used to
> enable some special display hacks if you are on a connection slower than
> 2400 baud.  It enables you, I guess, to run Emacs 27.1 on that spanking
> new 1987 modem that you have just been dying to get your hands on.
> 
> Yet there has been a marked lack of interest in it.  :-(
> 
> I wasn't able to find any discussion about it on emacs-devel since 2005,
> except for an honorable mention when Alan Mackenzie said in 2015 that
> the parts in isearch.el that use it are "probably obsolete".
> 
> More seriously, is `baud-rate' still relevant in the next decade?
> Should we make it obsolete in Emacs 28.1?

In my remote corner of the world, I sometimes have periods of time
that Internet crawls at 3KB/sec.  If I need to use Emacs on a remote
machine during that time, this "obsolete" mode is very useful, because
SSH sends more than just the characters I type.

So I definitely don't want it to become obsolete, let alone removed.
If "baud-rate" is what bothers you, we can augment the name or
documentation to explain when this is useful and why.

Thanks.