More frustration (Vim) resolved

Ugh, I spent the entire morning trying to fix a problem with Vim. I remember at one point getting frustrated that it refused to handle indentations of comments (which start with the hash or pound sign, #) correctly. The solution I got was to use someone else's indent file. Well, that indent file doesn't handle formatting lists extended over more than one line. But when I went back to the original, which worked for that, it couldn't handle the comments. I spent probably three hours searching for a solution, looking through $VIM/runtime/ trying to find out what the differences were between the different indent files. Furthermore, although the 'sh' file type displayed this behavior, the 'perl' file type did not!

Well, the long story was made short when I realized that the reason it forced all lines with a '#' to the beginning: it thought they were C preprocessor directives, which belong in column 1. I had unknowingly set an option, smartindent, which caused this behavior. Somehow, and I still haven't figured this out, the options in the Perl file mitigated that behavior.

Moral of this story: avoid setting options in vim that you aren't REALLY sure you understand. And with vim, this probably means you won't be setting many.