Well, even though I develop Rails apps for a living I wouldn’t say the style used in the Rails codebase should be considered some gold standard - after all they are outdenting “private/protected” there :-) That said - before I started using programming Ruby in Emacs I aligned to the beginning of the statement, but I stopped because this wasn’t supported in ruby-mode. After using the alignment to keyword style for several years I’ve grown to like it a lot (and it seems others are enjoying it as well http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2925028/how-do-you-assign-a-variable-with-the-result-of-a-if-else-block). I’m perfectly fine with alignment to statement becoming the default (although the change of this default would be fairly visible/disruptive, since as it stands keyword alignment is the only supported style and I guess most Rubyists using Emacs employ it).