If one were to start a project from scratch today, with the goal of having such a hyper-efficient TUI, similar to the Lowes/Costco ones, to be accessible via SSH/Telnet/locally... are there frameworks out there to use? Would my best bet still be ncurses? Are there simpler alternatives?

TurboVision: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

Charva - http://www.pitman.co.za/projects/charva/index.html

AbsTK - https://gobolinux.org/abstk/

The `rich` module for Python is remarkably complete and lets you code at a very high level - even has CSS. Rich's sibling, Textual[1] is designed for building TUIs.

[1] https://github.com/Textualize/textual

charm.sh is probably what you're looking for

Thanks for posting this. Learning that Charm exists just made me so happy. I can't wait to build something.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I’d use the default system GUI but build in an optional command line.

There is bubbletea for go