Internally at ftrack we use PyCharm as our main development tool. Visual Studio would be our second editor of choice, enabling additional free remote debugging against DCC:s/Maya.
It is possible to edit the code and configurations directly without and SCM, but that will make it very complicated to download and merge in new Framework releases as they are announced.
The recommended way of doing this is to create your own repositories and then sync in changes from ftrack by setting adding a remote pointer to our GitHub repositories. This process is described in detail within the :ref:`tutorial`.