@lritter
yeah, but I think mouse input requires a window to be useful (as reference for the coordinates), so they'd have to allow a terminal to be a SDL window, but having an SDL window that you can't render to would be kinda weird..
OTOH, you can set a dummy videodriver before SDL_Init(), with SDL_SetHint(SDL_HINT_VIDEODRIVER, "dummy"); and use parts of SDL that don't require a proper windowing backend.
I know that SDL Events do generally work, but I'm not sure which ones you can get then