in reply to text mode screen-oriented application development

Well, there's Curses, formats, heredocs, Text::Template,Term::Clui, PerlVision, Curses::UI, Term::TUI, Term::Menus, Term::ANSIMenu, Term::ANSIScreen, Term::Slang, Term::Cap, Term::Screen, Term::UI, Term::Newt, Term::ReadKey Term::Interact, Text::Flow, Text::Bind, Text::Repository, Text::Graphics, Text::T9, Text::ASCIITable::Wrap, and Text::MicroMason that all can deal with output, input, or both for text-based UIs. Of course that's not a complete list.

Of those, Term::SLang, Term::UI, PerlVision, Term::ANSIScreen, and Curses::UI seem to be fairly close to the overall functionality it seems you want.

Term::ReadKey and Term::Readline might be handy for taking the input. Text::T9 might be handy in certain circumstances.

Text::MicroMason, Text::Bind, Text::Repository could all be used to keep track of your forms if they are static screens.

Some of the flowing, wrapping, and capabilities checking modules could help you adjust to the dynamic terminal width you can have under PuTTY or another terminal emulator.

As for widely used, well documented, and well-supported, that's trickier. http://search.cpan.org has a rating system and update dates, and you can search online for any of those with Google or another search engine.

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