seeking shell gimmicks

I'm writing some shell utilities that will see a lot of punishment, and 
would benefit greatly from some common UI idioms.  Specifically, I'd 
like to know how to perform:

*  keyword completion - tab-expanding a term from a known set,
   ideally with some facility for partial completion and
   presentation of remaining options

*  in-place progress indicators - the ability to count from 1%
   to 100%, without occupying more than one line of the buffer

*  external-editor handoffs, whereby my code can call $EDITOR,
   wait for it to exit, and then pick up the file from /tmp, or
   wherever.

I can call external widgets if necessary, but system and shell 
portability would be swell, as I'm developing with tcsh/Mac OS X and 
deploying with bash under FreeBSD.  I've been poking through CPAN and 
various O'Reilly titles, but either the topic is too cozy a niche, or 
I'm not going about the search properly.

Any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated.

  -nat