For the handful slightly fancy TUI applications I wrote, I had some fun in just using raw escape sequences.
I really like the buildkit output style, I couldn't figure out how to do something like this – multiline output without a full-term application – with curses, so I did it myself.
Yeah, I built a TUI framework for fun. I was playing with making a TUI browser where everything is rendered server side like html and streamed over grpc.
Absolutely, yes, should've mentioned that. Most of these tools are for internal use at my company and I know what terminals they run in – even better: I can just test it.
But honestly, some of these run in tmux on my machine and in the Windows Terminal in production and both do the same thing.
I guess if you assume modern, emulated terminals and don't do exotic stuff (I mostly move the cursor and clear lines), you can go some way without termcap. It's a tool from a time when terminals where physical machines.
I really like the buildkit output style, I couldn't figure out how to do something like this – multiline output without a full-term application – with curses, so I did it myself.