[ESS] Ever consider changing indentation on #?

[Paul Johnson]

Here is a message from the "too much time on my hands" department.
But please consider it. Can we have flush left indentation on #?

Quite often, people who don't use Emacs send me files with # on
comments and the default Emacs indentation pushes that to the far
right side.

In some editors, the flush-right single # serves a purpose--it
facilitates "code folding" into sections. When I go through their code
and change all of the # to ##, and send it back to them, they say
"what the Hell, the folding is borked!". This is more and more common
with the adoption of markdown-style commentary within R files.

Until now, I've said "too bad" when they complain about their code,
but now I'm thinking we ought to consider changing the behavior of
Emacs/ESS.  Does it really really need to do # indentation that way?
Why?  I've always thought it is odd. And counterintuitive. In what
backwards world would one suppose # gets the most indent, while ###
gets none?. I don't see any benefit in that # indentation that way. I
do see a big benefit in the ## indent at the code level. I'm only
quibbling about #.

Would you ever consider changing the ESS default for R files so # is
flush left?  Could I offer you some cash to consider it?

I understand I *could* learn code for my emacs.init to do that, but it
seems like a change that would be broadly beneficial to new Emacs &
ESS users.  I preach the message about Emacs to the students here, but
little quirks like this seem like an unnecessary hassle.

pj
-- 
Paul E. Johnson   http://pj.freefaculty.org
Director, Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis http://crmda.ku.edu

To write to me directly, please address me at pauljohn at ku.edu.