When I do PL these days, I always start with the editor; e.g. see:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...

Co-designing your editor with your language allows for a better experience.

You are right in that all of this is basically undocumented in textbooks. Even their presentation on on parsing is mostly unhelpful (if you want an error tolerant incremental parser for your editor, recursive descent works very well).