[marktangotango]

All this exists in various IDE's for various languages (except the prefetch of 'good' google links) re keeping related code globs around. In particular Netbeans IDE supports a lot of dynamic languages. It's php, python, and javascript plugins all offer project views other than "what's on the filesystem", intellisense, code completion as you type. I suggest spending time exploring existing options if one hasn't.

RE editing text: whatever code object model one can imagine, it generally always serializes to text. I for one don't see the benefit of editing an abstract model in place of text. An example I liked was Fortress [1]. Fortress was a language that attempted to let users write code in mathematical notation using a special latex editor (iirc). It was found to be not a huge win, and they reverted to 'normal' syntax. This was one of Guy Steeles projects at sun.

So having said that, there are languages where editing the model is editing text: Lisp and Scheme.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language...