Terminals are a good example of something that seems really simple but is a major PITA because of too many different vendors in the early days, and no industry standard emerged. What is the closest thing? VT100? VT102? I mostly write raw to those, but stuff like terminal size and various other features like raw (non-cooked) mode are crappy and require ioctl's and such. Frankly, it sucks.
...but the libraries suck even more! If you don't want to link against ncurses then may God have mercy on your soul.
Previous summer I've toyed with trying to write an "async prompt" a-la Erlang's shell with output scrolling and line-editing (see e.g. [0] for example of what I am talking about), but it is so bloody difficult to do correctly, especially when the input spans several lines and there are some full-width characters on the screen, that I've abandoned it.
...but the libraries suck even more! If you don't want to link against ncurses then may God have mercy on your soul.