I'm a bit confused - if I explicitly want my text editor to open ~/.bash_profile, then I need to tell it that, which I would do through the Open dialog for GUI apps (or as a command line parameter for command line apps); and if I don't explicitly want to do so, then it probably shouldn't be opening it behind my back.

This sandboxing would be a problem with editors that naturally work with multi-file projects (e.g. an IDE where you'd want to open a whole Java project of linked files), but in the text editor scenario this limitation seems to make sense.