The biggest issue I have with the text-manipulation capabilities of the CLI is the inability to select text in the prompt with the keyboard. Shift+navigation buttons is standard to do this in GUI text boxes, but the CLI's slightly different notion of the cursor (box v. line caret) comes with the inability to select text keyboardly. How do others solve this problem? Are there e.g. readline replacements that have this capability?
This is why X allows you to copy text by highlighting it, and to paste text by middle clicking. The problem was solved a long time ago. Just grab the mouse and stop being a keyboard elitist.
Besides using yank/paste keyboard shortcuts, you can always use screen or tmux copy mode. If you need the output of a command sent to the clipboard, there's several ways, xclip is one of them.