"A good test case for whether a license is free (for issues like this) is whether a disconnected group of people on a desert island could distribute the software among themselves. In the vim case, they cannot. (For example, if the vim maintainer flies over the island and drops down a message saying "you must hereby send me your changes", how are the people down below to comply?) The fact that the vim maintainer can send the request does not say anything about whether the people receiving it could reply."

The venerable Dialog utility (based on ncurses, and maintained by the same person for the past couple of decades) is one option: a small program that can handle a variety of common interactions like choosing a file to open, or entering dates, while looking good and being easy enough to use.

The utility is as at https://invisible-island.net/dialog/dialog.html.

Probably an allusion to Human Interface Guidelines by Apple.

I just rediscovered a question I wrote on Stack Exchange. I can’t remember much about the context, but the idea is to have an ordinary “web server” application accessed through http, but simply sending plain-text backwards and forwards to a command-line based client.

A notebook is a human's best friend. It's the only friend who will always stay neutral to your argument, whether it is controversial or not. It's the only friend who will capture all of your wild and rational thoughts and feelings and give nothing back. It's the only friend that will tell you the most amazing or depressing stories, in which your younger self are the main character. It's the only friend that will store all of your thoughts years after your death and tell your stories to those who read it.

Summarizing Edward Tufte's essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint".