Doesn't UNIX (4.0, 4.1, 4.2 BSD) and those derived from it (e.g. Xenix) have a cursor-control package, and aren't there editors (e.g. vi, gnumacs, Gosling emacs) that use the termcap (or similar) information files? I believe that Franz Lisp provides a set of primitives to do all this character-screen oriented stuff (to the extent it is supported by Unix).