I wrote cboard, a simple text-mode frontnend for playing with UCI engine, which basically works the way you describe. It is part of the Haskell chessIO package.

https://github.com/mlang/chessIO

And Emacs Chess (also known as chess.el) has a "chess-plain" board variant which is configurable down to which letters should be used. Borders are also optional, all configurable.