Global indent

[Anders Wegge Keller]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:56:11 +1000
Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> Despite my comments, I don't actually have any objection to people who
> choose to use Emacs, or Vim, or edit their text files by poking the hard
> drive platter with a magnetised needle if they prefer :-) But I do think
> it's silly of them to claim that Emacs has no learning curve, or to fail to
> recognise how unfamiliar and different the UIs are compared to nearly
> everything else a computer user is likely to be familiar with in 2014.

 Really, they don't! At least not for the people, for whom they are
necessary tools. When I started in my present job, "remote access" was
a dial-up modem, that could do 2400 baud, if you were lucky[1]. With such a
shitty connection, a text-only editor is indisputably the right thing. 

 Curiously enough, even today the same lousy kind of connections prevail. We
still have a sizeable modem bank at my job. We still do our remote support
over a telnet/ssh session. And we still are unable to reliable get the 
connection speeds[2], that would make anything with a GUI remotely
pleasant. 

 So emacs and vim still have their niches. Those of us, who are old enough
to have started our first job in a glorified teletype, OR have to support
systems that are only reachable over RFC-1149 quality datalinks, belong
there. The rest of you would probably be better off with something nicer.

1. Meaning a real switched landline all the way from Denmark to Tokyo.
Ending up with two satellite up/down-links was a killer.

2. We have an installation in the Philippines, where we ended up installing a
   satellite uplink. It feels like we have doubled the connectivity of the
   entire Manilla area by doing so. And it's still painfully slow.

-- 
//Wegge