Dream Weaver Settings to help show unneeded # signs

According to Macromedia's Livedocs

Macromedia recommends that you use pound signs only when necessary. The following example shows the preferred method for referencing variables.

[color #990000]<cfset SomeVar = Var1 + Max(Var2, 10 * Var3) + Var4>[/color]
In contrast, note the following example, which uses pound signs unnecessarily:
[color #990000]
<cfset #SomeVar# = #Var1# + #Max(Var2, 10 * Var3)# + #Var4#>
[/color]

Click to expand...

A lot of people use pound signs when they are not needed like in the examples above and below. There is a setting you can change in dreamweaver to help see these extra hash marks.

If you use Dreamweaver, the below color scheme is what you may see when editing a coldfusion page in "code view".
In this case the extra hash marks are around the trim function:
[color blue]#trim([/color]form.fieldName[color blue])#[/color]

In dreamweaver MX / MX 2004 you can highlight these # signs.

click Edit > Preferences > select Code Coloring > select Coldfusion > click [color blue]Edit Coloring Scheme[/color] > select [color green]ColdFusion Script Bracket[/color] > click the "B" button to make the selected text bold* > click OK > click ok again on the preferences box.

*You can also change the color if you like, however it also changes ( and ) and [ and ] inside the coldfusion tags. In my opinion I thought it was more of a change to what I'm used to just to highlight a pound sign.

Your code will now be colored like this making it easy to identify extra unneeded hash marks. The bold pound signs below can/should be removed for best practice.
The below example shows what it looks like if you change the color for the [color green]ColdFusion Script Bracket[/color] setting along with making it bold. I'll use gold.