Yup, sure beats the hell out of busybox anyway.
So anyway, as hackish as this all is, the gethostname.sh script could be useful to others who want a simple dialog box to grab data from the user, but can't figure out how to set up a toolchain to code a native GTK or whatever app.
It's pretty primitive though, requires kterminal and zsh, writes its data to a temp file which is inelegant, and also doesn't handle the user pressing arrow keys, home, end, etc well. So, if anyone wants to improve on this, feel free to use it in whatever.