How do you select text then? I'm sure there are ways, but they are certainly not intuitive and I've never bothered to look them up since I don't do this task as often.
Do you mean "select text from whatever is displayed in the terminal" or "select text in Vim"?
I never select or copy anything from the terminal: pbcopy on the Mac OS X and xclip on Linux are what I use to get stuff from the shell into the system clipboard.
I don't think that's what you ask, but in Vim, visual selection is done by hitting v (character-wise), V (line-wise) and Ctrl-v (block-wise) followed by a motion or a text-object: va{, vit and so on.
