If you're in copy mode in tmux - prefix [ then you can use emacs or vim keybindings to do your selection and copying, and then it's just prefix ] to paste into an editor. If you're comfortable selecting a few pages of text with Vim, it doens't take a terribly long time to get used to doing it with tmux.

That said, use what makes you productive, and be happy!

Have you tried tmux's mouse modes?

You can use the mouse wheel to scroll and highlight to copy. I think you are specifically trying to say the mouse highlight won't go past one window though, right?

You can also resize panels and select widows.

I knew I saw a way to interact with it through the mouse. Thank you for reminding me. `tmux` is really a neatly little program, everything is there, simple and efficient.

ps:

    man tmux | grep "mouse-" # shows the mouse related options
    C-b : "set mouse-<option> on"

pps: turning on mouse windows/panels interactions disable text selection, do you know a way to have both ? (beside switching beside custom defined modes on your .conf)

You can always do text selection in a terminal by holding shift while selecting the text, no matter if the program running in the terminal supports mouse or not. I think on some terminals it's alt instead of shift.

I don't seem to have that problem, :/

make sure "mouse-mode on" is set, rather than "mouse-mode copy-mode".

Here is my mouse config:

set-window-option -g mode-mouse on

set-option -g mouse-resize-pane on

set-option -g mouse-select-pane on

set-option -g mouse-select-window on

set-option -g mouse-utf8 on