I have used ncurses to build a simple backend interface, that I use for testing new features etc. The end result looks nice, and is functional, but ncurses the library is a pain. It feels like something that would not be written by a programmer today: C, manual pointer-management, the interface feels too low-level. I ended up writing a C++ wrapper around it, adding thread-safety, better scrolling and some convenience functions (the ncurses form library I believe was a particular pain).

What I would like is a high-quality redesign of ncurses with a modern C++ interface.

A modernized curses library with clean UTF-8 support would be really nice. There's no need to make it a drop-in system library replacement, either, so there's no need to maintain ABI compatibility, as ncurses does.

re. UTF-8 support: ncurses does include this, in libncursesw. It seems to work, although I haven't tried anything outside of Latin-1.

Probably someone will remember this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface (TUI) framework developed around 1990 by Borland for Pascal, and C++.

Perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to generate both from a common abstraction. Otherwise, you either impose ncurses look&feel to the web (might look like a web terminal emulator), or you force the web into the terminal (might look like a text browser e.g. w3m, lynx, links, elinks)

Why not use https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed ?

you'd create a markup with component names, instead of html. so you'd have panel, button, divider, pane, window, menu, etc as tags. you can then render those using polymer or react etc. and none of it is polluted by garish html.