The thing is that the candidate does not know if the interviewer falls into the pragmatic or dogmatic camp. I've absolutely had cases where the interviewers ins

The thing is that the candidate does not know if the interviewer falls into the pragmatic or dogmatic camp. I've absolutely had cases where the interviewers insisted that the applicant was proficient in a specific compiler toolchain + hardware debugger setup (for pretty generic embedded ARM where skills transfer nicely from other commerical ARM ecosystems), and cases where the interviewer gets hung up on coding style. So, yes, I'll fiddle with the editor, because I'm not a fucking mind reader. Besides, putting the candidate into gedit and then talking about debuggers is a bit inconsistent. If you put me into this situation, I'll of course use printf() debugging, whereas in a familiar environment I'd use the debugger.