(Context: I love the command line, and don't plan to abandon it, but others may find a TUI easier to transition to on the path to CLI superiority. I couldn't find one, so I decided to appeal to the wisdom of the masses to identify a potential solution.)
TUI to me also means "arbitrary coordinate rendering," i.e. something completely distinguishable to a command-line prompt (and line-editing). So one expects modal dialogs and popups, menus / menu navigation, and essentially "windows of experience."
TUI also may mean "cannot easily pipe things," because we have (x, y) positions instead of one cursor location receiving all inputs. The idea of improvised composability may be absent.
It would be neat to see an "expect for TUIs." I wonder how it would standardize the idea of "textual graphics" across a variety of different TUI tools.
A similar line of shell-like TUIs would be X-Tree Gold (http://vtda.org/docs/computing/XTree/XTreeGold20UsersGuide.p...) and any of its clones.
Vim has Netrw: https://vonheikemen.github.io/devlog/tools/using-netrw-vim-b...
Emacs has Dired mode: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredMode
If it’s just a list of windows and the time of day, that’s possible in a terminal multiplexer like GNU Screen, although setting it up is unintuitive.
Some people treat Emacs as it’s own operating system in the terminal.
I often use ssh between machines. "Works for Me".