I don't want to vigorously defend the organization of the git repo, but browsing the source code of Smalltalks is always an issue. The source code is closely tied to the "browser" and for the longest time this was the only way to view the classes contained in an image. At some point mechanisms were designed to serialize the code to source control repos. The relationship of Smalltalk and version control systems is a difficult one.

In the case of Newspeak, I only would edit the raw source code if I had no other way to do it. It is so much easier and ergonomic to use the Newspeak IDE to view and modify the code, with the live debugger, object introspection and all the advantages that the IDE gives you. The recent addition of exemplars, where working fragments of the code are part of the documentation, is especially nice.

> … only way to view the classes contained in an image…

Apart from a text editor?

        $ nano Pharo9.0-64bit-bf4a85f.sources

        [Read 1230003 lines (Converted from Mac format)]

"The relationship of Smalltalk and version control systems [not designed to preserve that Smalltalk way of working] is a difficult one."

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

It’s probably loaded into the image Iceberg-style. Git is just a backend to persist to, that way.