What setting in vim counteracts smartindent's refusal to indent # comments in shell scripts?

Find the indent file, (e.g. /usr/share/vim/vim71/indent/sh.vim on my system)

This line looks like the problem:

setlocal indentkeys-=:,0#

Perhaps you can fix this in your .vimrc or load a custom indent file manually.

edit: It looks more complicated than I thought, but maybe there is something specifically set in the indenting file that you would need to fix.

2nd edit: Looks like I was completely wrong, Check out:

Restoring indent after typing hash

or

howto-configure-vim-to-not-put-comments-at-the-beginning-of-lines-while-editing

Well, after exploring some options, including using ':set cindent' instead of ':set smartindent', I've ended up reverting to just using ':set autoindent'. There probably are ways to make this stuff work exactly as I want it to, but it is messy enough and fiddly enough that I can't be bothered. I've worked fine with autoindent for the previous 20-odd years, and the benefits from the extra bells and whistles provided by smartindent are outweighed by the what I regard as its misbehaviour.

Thank you, Juan, for your assistance. Believe it or not, it did help - quite a lot.

I also discovered a couple of other neat commands, though, while following up on this:

>i}>a}

These right-shift the block of code you are in. The 'i' version indents the body and not the closing braces (my preferred style), and the 'a' version indents the closing braces to (the version that is required at work).

Also, you can apply qualifiers to '%' in commands executed at the shell:

:make %:r.o

This would run make on the 'root' of the current file name (that's '%:r') followed by '.o'. Or, in other words, if I'm editing somefile.c, this executes make somefile.o.

Add the line below in your .vimrc

filetype indent on

(it will set the right indent mode depending on the filetype)