I really think curses causes more problems than it solves, today. It made sense back when terminals were hardware, and communications with them were really slow. Today? Explain to your friend what he needs to do when he connects to the solaris server on his campus, using rxvt-unicode, and all curses-using applications are completely broken. How to compile & install the terminfo file, where to get it, where to put it, and what to do because "rxvt-unicode" is too long a name for the implementation. Then explain to him why software won't use ansi standard codes that would just work.

Nah my editor is not on github. I figured that I'm only writing it for myself anyway; any rational people should be happy with nvi or vim or one of a few dozen other editors. And the few stubborn ones like me will want to write their own editor anyway. :-)