I posted this on the blog itself, but re-mentioning it here... I've been evolving Xiki for over 10 years to do be a language for doing this kind of thing. The ideas is you can interact with trees and other nested structures (file paths, dbs, general UI's) from your text editor, using a simple plaintext representation, but in a GUI-like manner.

I've done talks about Xiki at RubyConf, Strange Loop, and QCon. Here's a quick 3 minute video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUR_eUVcABg. I'm doing a Kickstarter campaign soon, to bring Xiki support to vim, sublime, and possibly other text editors!