One thing I found out the lazy way is that for single purpose UI as part of some overall process (Point of sale, Order picking and what not) TUI really works be

One thing I found out the lazy way is that for single purpose UI as part of some overall process (Point of sale, Order picking and what not) TUI really works because the set of actions is constrained by what Fx key you can press and what barcode you can read. For convention front office (cash/voucher/pre-order converted into event ticket) I ended up with UI that mimicks IBM's ISPF built on top of Python's urwid. Previous versions were straight readline (which worked well for the happy path) and GUI thing which confused the operators.