I'm not entirely sure where you're trying to go with this. There was no command-line mode for the Mac. You couldn't take e.g. Wordstar (good grief, it's been a while since I last typed that name!) , and run it with little modification on a Mac. You would first have to write a GUI-based console for your text-only app to run in. There was no console SDK. Yes, it was possible to do, but as it would take as much work as writing the app as a proper GUI app anyhow, you might as well forget about the console.
Well, you said there was no text-based programming, whereas I remember doing it... I'm pretty sure you could run your code in the MPW shell and use STDIN and STDOUT as per any C program of the time. CodeWarrior also had this, called WASTE there.
Could you deliver that text program to the user such that they could compose it with others in a standard environment? I think that's the real point - that programmers were discouraged from falling into habits of older platforms.
