This reminds me of something I have always wanted in the UNIX ecosystem:

"topify"

... which is the word I would use to describe a primitive that will take line inputs from stdio and display them in a 'top' style output, presumably with curses.

Maybe there is more complication here than I have thought out but ... if I can output a standard line with columns I have already defined (perhaps in an 'awk' pipeline or whatever) then I would like a way to refresh them, in some order.

I am fairly certain this does not exist ...