Curses

No I am not particularly angry - I am talking about ncurses text user interface programming. Surprisingly curses is a very nice solution when you are constrained by complex network paths from where you have data and where you need to display it; with curses all you need is an ssh connection.

Curses provides a simple abstraction of the terminal's coordinates, colorization, and some other special effects - yes in the world of GPU accelerated toolkits, calling blinking text a special effect makes one smile, but some simple things are quite effective in real use.

Python has excellent support for curses (it comes with a module that is a pretty complete wrapper of the curses api). I was able to whip up a multithreaded curses based position tracking script in a few evenings, works like a charm.