Can't this be made more general and modular by creating a windowing system for terminals first, and then write little programs that operate in that system?

At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'?

I use TMUX to essentially create what this person has made. It's much more versatile than a GUI for me because I can kill any "widget" and reopen it with altered command line parameters. It's an incredibly useful and productive way to work. And if I realize that I want data that isn't present, I can just split a TMUX pane (or start a new TMUX window) and display it there.

Can you share how you create a certain window/buffer setup on tmux automatically?

Someone mentioned it a few months back and it greatly simplified my life. You specify your layouts (and tmux will give you the information to copy a current layout). You can then tell it what programs to run in each window of the layout.

So I have a window broken into 5 panes (as an example). The top left runs emacs (via emacsclient) and opens my ledger.org file. The other 4 show various reports I want to see: Current cleared balance, current uncleared balance, current uncleared transactions, future transactions (out to a month), and a running balance sheet across the past several months.

In another two windows I just have a shell and an emacsclient instance (because I live in emacs). Then as I come up with other things I want to see (weather information, summaries of my todos, email inbox (tally at least) I can add new window and pane configurations to my tmuxinator configuration. When I restart it, everything is back as I had it (if I put them in the config).

I haven't done as much coding at home as I'd like lately (and it's all Windows at the office). But I have a couple other tmuxinator configs that will layout several windows and panes for development. Like launch an editor, and have spaces laid out like I want for debuggers and test monitoring scripts. As appropriate to the language and task.

https://github.com/tmuxinator/tmuxinator

For the constantly refreshed display, it's mostly `watch -t ` (modifying the refresh rate if necessary. `-t` removes the title text from the top of watch so it only shows the command outputs. Which is something it took me way too many years to realize.