> you can do much more far more easily in notepad with a mouse/trackpad
This is just completely bogus. If you think about how large a terminal window is, on average, you have a grid of (e.g.) 100x50. That means you're trying to click one out of 5,000 symbols (for example the start of a word), which are very tiny. If you then think about this in terms of Fitts's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law), you can see how clicking one tiny character with a tiny mouse on a large screen isn't the easiest thing.
Compare that to using your keyboard. For instance, if you're looking for the word "pipe", typing this in vim:
/pipe
Is obviously much faster. I don't see how anyone could believe that using a mouse is more efficient for such tasks.
This is just completely bogus. If you think about how large a terminal window is, on average, you have a grid of (e.g.) 100x50. That means you're trying to click one out of 5,000 symbols (for example the start of a word), which are very tiny. If you then think about this in terms of Fitts's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law), you can see how clicking one tiny character with a tiny mouse on a large screen isn't the easiest thing.
Compare that to using your keyboard. For instance, if you're looking for the word "pipe", typing this in vim:
Is obviously much faster. I don't see how anyone could believe that using a mouse is more efficient for such tasks.