Depending on what you are doing here, the code in https://gitorious.org/getikz/ might be interesting (a gedit plugin to edit PGF/TikZ figures, it does require rubber though). This is pretty neat when combined with the tikzinclude LaTeX package if you want multiple similar graphics in one file.

Yes, it's worth taking a look at the getikz implementation. But for LaTeXila it should be based on latexmk.