I wonder if it would be possible to extend a terminal multiplexer to the point of providing such an intuitive interface to existing TUI software on modern *ix systems. I'm sure the effort would be quite non-trivial, but it would help a number of workflows. Adding support for the additional features that are found in these TUI environments (consider e.g. menubars) could then be done via custom terminal extensions.
Check out the VTM project[1]! It feels like that's the direction they're heading. No direct affiliation; they've filed some bugs on Windows Terminal, however. :)
Well, that's a terminal multiplexer but not very TUI like. I don't think it would be directly usable over a low-bandwidth SSH connection, which is the kind of use case people often have in mind for TUI's.
Oh, great! Happy to help. I've been using it for years now -- it's becoming a faithful friend, to the bafflement of my colleagues who are mostly Vi(m) or Emacs fans.
The one thing it doesn't do for me is pick up Git commit templates, so for that I have to have my default set to `mc`. I don't know why that one thing doesn't function.
It was kind of a complete floating windows GUI in a TUI: http://setedit.sourceforge.net/se1.gif