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I did some tests and ended up with a working comp. All it does is sending the registers to the drivers and then taking a velocity command as input and giving a position feedback as output. For now the settings are set by defining registers values as parameters, which isn't the easiest way to do it. It would probably not be too difficult to code a GUI to change the registers values according to more "readable" parameters. The comp also uses the bcm2835 library, which isn't compatible with RPI5 as far as I know. I'd like to change the code to directly write to spidev one day.

Here is a short video showing 3 motors moving: Link to youtube video
Edit: added a second video with physical axis attached to the drivers: Link to youtube video

The 4 drivers are connected in daisy chained mode and communicate with the Pi at 3.125MHz. All the read, write and PID stuff is done in the servo thread set at 1ms. Just using 4 pins for SPI and 1 as enable, there are plenty left for the other functions.

But there is more to explore; the TMC5160 has an encoder input and rather than reading the internal step counter, one could read the encoder counter as position feedback. There are also reference inputs that can be used directly on the board, and the possibility to do sensorless homing. A 50$ RPi, a couple of 15$ stepper driver and some cheap 3.3V->24V level shifter; could become a interesting poor man's closed-loop-stepper CNC controller.

The pan/rotate button works like a charm, thank you very much!

G5x button only show G54, no drop down menu at all. And when the program is running, if you press ABS or DTG button, G54 becomes inactive.

About the REF button - if the calculator window will be called - that would be very handy.

Btw, if there is a way for the G5x button to also call something like a calculator with big buttons, that would be perfect!

Yes, changing the sign on the scale flips over the following PINs:
   (all begin with hm2_7i92.0.encoder.00.)
   position
   velocity-rpm
   velocity
the change has no effect on:
   count
   rawcounts

As it turned out, I fixed it another way. I had the ESD button connected to the encoder-B  DB-25 P11 (14) input. I moved the ESD to my BOB #2 and left no input for encoder-B. This flipped the encoder.00 inputs to all positive and I was able to leave the encoder scale at +180..

Now I can thread again, so problem solved! Thanks for the help!