I still think you'll end up selecting against a lot of great hires. Plenty of great programmers simply don't use vim/emacs, even if aware of them. The question

I still think you'll end up selecting against a lot of great hires. Plenty of great programmers simply don't use vim/emacs, even if aware of them. The question didn't seem to be about awareness but rather about experience. I am aware of both and actively choose not to use either - I use nano if it's ever easiest to edit a file on the terminal, and otherwise, stick to IDE's and things like Sublime/Atom. It's really popular in the startup world to care deeply about enthusiasm about the subject at home, but a lot of these litmus tests won't consistently hit that. Even though you may generally get better programmers on average through these types of screens and companies are free to hire as they please when it comes to this, it seems rather unfair to a good programmer who simply likes to do other things in their spare time. Requiring programmers that live and breathe CS makes it feel much more exploitative.