Leaving the GUI doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be leaving your mouse behind, too. It's certainly an option to ditch the mouse, but copying and pasting blocks of text is much easier with one.

To use your mouse in the terminal, you need the General Purpose Mouse (GPM) driver. It's almost guaranteed to be included with your distribution, so in all likelihood, your mouse will work without any intervention on your part. If the mouse does not work, you probably either don't have GPM installed, or it is not being started at boot time. Use your distro's package manager to search for and install it, and make sure it is set to start at your default runlevel.

To copy and paste text, right-click a word to select it, or click and drag to select lines of text. Once you have everything selected, move the text cursor (not the mouse cursor!) to the place where you would like the block to be pasted, then move the mouse cursor to the same place and click both the right and left mouse buttons at the same time. Some mice are configured such that clicking the mouse wheel performs this function instead.

Next: Increasing Your Resolution »