ncurses seems powerful. Any good suggestions on a tutorial or introduction to ncurses (which it appears is what was used for the ui here)? Ideally for python, or generalized... Or is there a better tool to learn for generic command line UIs?
The initial blog-post which announced the editor is worth a read, as is the discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065217
My own version adds Lua support, multiple buffers, and similar features. It is by no means the best of the editors but I had fun playing with it - to the extent I was almost tempted to write an editor. (But then I realized I already have vim for writing email, and emacs for everything else. The world really doesn't need another editor!)
While you're at it, consider rewriting everything you have in Rust. (obligatory statement as the member of ritf)
PS: the termion suggestion is not a joke
For actually shipping the code around, you could use pkg [3] to generate a single binary. That lets you avoid having to install node or any supporting libraries.
[0] https://github.com/chjj/blessed
[1] https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed