One feature which I appreciate is that it's memory usage is much lower than that of xterm. Some xterm variants make use of color, but some don't. Then there is xterm's Tektronix compatibility, which I've never seen a use for. Jed , John Davis's emacs-like editor, is surprisingly capable considering it is a fraction of the size of any real emacs. Jed has syntax-highlighting for a variety of file types.
Slang is the default in recent versions of MC and the two are well-matched.
Color really makes this classic comm program more usable, especially in an rxvt window. The Mutt mail program is an interesting offshoot of Elm development which is well on its way toward becoming an alternative to Pine and Elm. Slang is listed as an alternative to ncurses in the pre-compilation configure script options, but I can't say how well it works as it will only successfully compile with ncurses on my system. Dosemu , though still dubbed an alpha version by the development team, is remarkably stable and useful. After the compilation I ran ldd against the dos binary and found that it is dynamically linked with the Slang library.