You're not alone - I also revolted against the TUI crowd and created my own GUI-centric harness juggler (https://github.com/juggler-ai/juggler). Might be up your street. If you're not too involved in your own project, maybe help out on mine :)
Honestly, I just don't get the TUI obsession, other than the fact that people are multiplexing many remote sessions over ssh. So my aim with juggler was to have an architecture that could do all the multi-client remote sessions with a GUI/websockets/Y.js sync etc.
Ha, your columns look a lot like why I made my own as well - https://github.com/chicagobuss/crusteo
I loved the utility of paseo but like the OP didn't want to build on web frameworks, so I re-wrote all of it in rust with zed's ui framework for the frontend desktop client.
More on my personal blog about it here: https://chicagobuss.dev/blog/my-setup/
Using TUI is also architecturally simpler. I don't want to rely upon third-party mappings of the CLI/MCP to the GUI, which are potentially incomplete or buggy.
Thanks Julian, I just checked it and it looks lovely and ticks quite a few of the boxes in my mental model. I will clone and dig in.
Also, I don't remember how but I have heard of JUCE before and I immediately recognized it even though I have never used it. I think I spend too much time on github :D