Apropos of life in the TTY, vermaden referenced this interesting file manager in his latest "Valuable News":

https://github.com/leo-arch/clifm

I'm definitely going to give this one a try!

(I'd already decided to eliminate the ncurses dependency in the latest rewrite of my mpg123 frontend and just use printf(3) and its relatives instead. So I'm interested to see how non-curses things like this do it.)