Removing the leading asterisk from JavaScript comments in Emacs

The default behaviour of Emacs' JavaScript mode, js.el, is, when doing fill-paragraph on a "traditional C comment" of the form

/* Set whether the user wants to open search results in a new window. */

is to format it into the form

/* Set whether the user wants to open search results in a new
 * window. */

The following Emacs lisp alters this behaviour to give you

/* Set whether the user wants to open search results in a new
   window. */

without the leading asterisk.

(add-hook 'js-mode-hook 
          (lambda ()
            (setq c-block-comment-prefix "  "
                  c-comment-prefix-regexp "//+\\|\\**")))

(download)

This is necessary because Emacs' JavaScript mode actually uses c-mode.el to do its formatting, but it overrides your C mode settings with its own version of c-block-comment-prefix, so setting the value of c-block-comment-prefix by itself doesn't work, you need to re-set it to undo what js.el does.