Related, I am wondering if somebody is aware of a project to wrap cli utilies in a minimal 'TUI', along the lines of this: https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey , but staying in the terminal. You'd pass the name of the program to run as the first argument. Haven't thought this through fully.
EDIT: well, some discussion about this: https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey/issues/296