Hah, they took my idea for TUIG!

I think that’s the wrong path, personally. Just my two cents. Back when terminals were purely text-based, it made sense to imitate buttons and windows — Norton Commander, Turbo Vision, that whole thing. Nostalgic, sure. But these days, if you want to give users a more advanced interface, just use the platform’s native GUI. There’s not much point in faking it with text. In a terminal, structured text is enough. You can make it clearer with colors and status bars, but I wouldn’t take it any further than that.