kill it. kill it with fire.

though to be fair, ncurses isn't a joy to work with.

Why kill it? What's wrong with CLI interfaces?

There's nothing wrong with CLIs. Emulating the idiocy of HTML in the terminal window is... suboptimal.

(n)curses isn't great, but the joy of ncurses is it's so bad you know you need to replace it (or more likely layer something on top of it.)