Yes, I've been following it for a while - it's exactly the kind of research that I had on my mind. I don't necessarily agree with some of the design choices (I don't think we need a middle layer underneath VT100 emulation to make TUI apps, TUI is IMHO just terrible as a concept to begin with), but SHMIF has the mark of a battle-tested protocol, and many other concepts are very interesting.

I appreciate the commitment it has to backwards compatibility - the TUI apps are better by virtue of running on top of Arcan's layer, with no changes.

They treat CLIs as a subclass of TUIs. Underneath it all it is just a high-level decoupling API to replace ncurses/readline/.... The output becomes a window with a packed-text buffer format. You can mix and match graphical windows with TUI(CLI) ones in the same client.