When you mentioned retro I was expecting something like editline. Now I feel old.

Anyways, the TUI on mainstream MS-DOS 6.22 and Borland from those days were incomparable to anything on mainstream Linux even on these days. For some reason Linux is the king of text mode and yet never had a proper TUI tradition.

Thank you for sharing the project. Compiled well on my side, looking forward to the next developments. My (unrequested) feedback:

+ consider renaming from C-edit (uppercase) to lower case c-edit, because it is simpler to type from the terminal.

+ the animations of the spining part on top was distracting

+ some menus missing to implement functionality, didn't test copy&paste

+ mouse support would be nice, albeit optional but would complete the MS-DOS 6.22 / borland style since it supported mouse there too

Thank you.