I know the OP isn't discussing this one until next time: > 5. IDE oriented development But it should also be practical to manually edit text files as a fallba

I know the OP isn't discussing this one until next time: > 5. IDE oriented development But it should also be practical to manually edit text files as a fallback, assuming one is OK with not having niceties such as auto-completion and on-the-fly error checking. Counter-examples are Apple's .pbxproj (Xcode project) and .xib/.storyboard (Interface Builder) files. The reason I want this is in case part or all of the IDE is unusable or just unproductive for some developers. For example, as far as I know, blind programmers can't practically create a UI in Apple's Interface Builder. Hand-editing markup like XAML is OK though.