I hate the mouse. It's good for some things, but not my work. Switching between the mouse and the keyboard wreaks havoc on my muscle memory and fine-motor flow. Thanks to Emacs, Ion, Pine, Gaim, and Firefox (God bless Find As You Type), I can do everything I need to with the keyboard. The only thing I can't do with the keyboard is copy text from a terminal. And that irks me.

In the past, this has driven me to desperate measures, including running shells inside Emacs. I currently use GNU screen's copy/scrollback mode, with a hack to integrate it with X Windows' clipboard.

This command in my .screenrc copies screen's paste buffer into the X primary selection. It runs automatically when you press > to set the second mark in copy/scrollback mode.

# set the second mark, write to the screen-exchange
# file, and use xsel to synchronize the paste buffer
# with the X selection.
bindkey -m > eval "stuff ' '" writebuf "exec sh -c 'xsel -n < /tmp/screen-exchange'"

Note that this uses Conrad Parker's xsel (not Ville Herva's xsel), which needs to be somewhere in your PATH.

See also:

• Emacs keybindings in GNU screen's copy-scrollback mode
• why I don't run shells inside Emacs
• RatPoison Wiki: mouseless paste
• autocutsel clipboard and primary patch
• control arrow keys in rxvt, tcsh, and emacs
• Emacs and remote X Windows