I don't think we'd reinvent or replace all of curses, as it does more than raw terminal handling (e.g. logical windowing). In my mind it's a layer on top of an area of displayed text. Win32 console doesn't implement any of that either.
I'm talking about the layer that interprets the in-band escape sequences of actual type-able characters into logical functions (e.g. ESC[4D into "cursor back 4 spaces"), and the databases of long-obsolete hardware quirks that go with it. Replacing that with something closer to the actual keyboards people use (e.g. vt100 didn't HAVE F1-F4 keys, the codes for them are another non-standard area) shouldn't be so dramatic a change, especially when what we think of as remote text terminals these days are typically two fully featured computers running SSH. Perhaps a remote terminal API should just be an SSH protocol extension?
I'm talking about the layer that interprets the in-band escape sequences of actual type-able characters into logical functions (e.g. ESC[4D into "cursor back 4 spaces"), and the databases of long-obsolete hardware quirks that go with it. Replacing that with something closer to the actual keyboards people use (e.g. vt100 didn't HAVE F1-F4 keys, the codes for them are another non-standard area) shouldn't be so dramatic a change, especially when what we think of as remote text terminals these days are typically two fully featured computers running SSH. Perhaps a remote terminal API should just be an SSH protocol extension?