Treat terminal like an emacs buffer
Solution 1:
Use tmux
Use tmux inside the terminal emulator of your choice.
- Tmux is very keyboard friendly.
- You can configure the buffers to be as large as you want.
- You can scroll through them and do the cut and paste stuff that you described.
- When your window manager crashes you can just open a terminal and get back to exactly where your terminal session was.
- Tmux is like
screen, but modernized and friendly to automation.
If you spend your life in a terminal it is very handy.