Lots of people have trouble configuring their terminals for sane behaviour: you need to have the right TERM, the correct locale settings, the right keyboard mappings for DEL/BS and the function keys, the right stty settings, a font that supports all the common characters, and so on.
To help, someone could write an ncurses-based tool that walked the user through setting up their terminal. It could display some example graphics and say how they should look, get them to press various keys and tell them what they need to fix, and finally print some advice about what they need to add to their profile to have "normal" settings. Since different people have different preferences about things like DEL/BS, some configurability would be necessary.