So weird to see this at #1 since I was researching this exact topic last night. My idea is a fully scriptable (Racket or CL) editor with modern package management system. A tiny C core would handle rendering (curses, etc.). Very cool write up though!
As an alternative to ncurses, I encourage you to look at termbox[1]. It's small, minimal, and very robust in my experience. (As a side note, the author also wrote a text editor in Go that uses it.)
