smartindent doesn't allow one to manually indent lines beginning with “#”

Question

The shortcut >> doesn't indent lines that start with # for me in either C or Python when smartindent is set.

If anyone has a workaround, that would be cool; I'm also posting this let people know (it was rather confusing and frustrating why that key wasn't working).

Answer 1

This is discussed in a related post on SO, which refers to :h smartindent and recommends setting nosmartindent as a workaround. Are you using filetype indent on to get the full language-dependent indenting?:

Vim automatically removes indentation on Python comments

Answer 2

Yes, the behavior is expected >> does not work with # as documented in :help smartindent. The doc also has a work around given:

:inoremap # X^H#

where ^H is entered as Ctrl + V Ctrl + H