Driving a text editor as part of a user interface, as this post describes, reminds me of a similar tradition in Lisp. Think of Emacs and other Lisp Machine editors. Such design patterns were also common on Interlisp-D with the TEdit editor which could also be used as a GUI component.
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Yes.
This approach needs a language whose constructs can be put in the text file, though.
Sometimes the language is trivial, like the language of Git commit messages or the crontab or /etc/passwd languages (given on the above page as examples).
Sometimes not so trivial, or decidedly nontrivial.
And for something completely different, the content of an Emacs comint buffer (e.g. a shell buffer) is not only text to which Emacs navigation or editing commands can be applied, but it can also be written to a file.
