>If I could get them jazzed to tell me about their editor configuration, that was almost always a good candidate. Because people who care about writing code care about editors.

I agree with much of your post, but just wanted to point out that many of these things are not universal. I personally have little interest in code editors and even less in discussing them, though I do use Emacs and will probably never invest in learning another editor. It's just a tool to me though, and writing custom lisp functions to make it work just how I want has just never been of my thing.