Curses and notcurses have their place but I still miss the simplicity of borland's conio.h implementation. Also remember that visual basic was initially written for DOS. Having a open source multiplatform text mode visual basic would be interesting.

Not exactly what you’re describing, but check out Final Cut: https://github.com/gansm/finalcut

Screenshot are cool! I remember someone had maintained the open source implementation of turbo vision. I don't hear about it for a long time, so I think it was abandoned and it had to make a few changes to workaround turbo vision unsafeness. This one seems cool!