You could try tkwidgets/text. I really should finish that library. Its close to done, and it'll probably a suite of nice GUI objects, including something like textedit.
I remember looking at this some time ago. it would be great if you bundled
it with pd asap, because that gives much more options than the old-as-pd
gui objects. if I recall correctly, it also has the drop-down menus,
textedit, buttons, etc. Was it this one?