Comment by briandoll

One nit: "considering the loss of the convenience of mouse input"

You can get full mouse support in tmux/vim.

I recently read the tmux book by the pragmatic programmers and highly recommend it: http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux

It's short, well written and contains lots of essential configuration tips to get not only mouse support but also system copy/paste on a mac. Here's my tmux.conf if you're curious: https://github.com/briandoll/dotfiles/blob/master/tmux.conf