I love this but with all the advances of TUI frameworks, using C + ncurses feels like such a hard path.

It's a tool with a long vintage, and it wouldn't make sense to port it to a different language just to take advantage of the likes of bubbletea or textual.

Agreed. Also for something this complex, performance isn't going to be automatically good enough I suspect.

Cool which newer TUI frameworks do you prefer?

Rust's ratatui is pretty good on the lower-level side of things