Ctrl-K and Ctrl-U in nano, a sane editor that does not hate you

Just switch to visual mode and select the text and yank it.

Press v where you want to start the selection from (switches to visual mode), hjkl (or arrow keys) to move the cursor to the end, then you can yank it from there. It'll highlight what you're selecting just like you're using your mouse, but you're using the keyboard.

If you want to get really fancy there are 3 different kinds of visual mode, but lower case is the most often one that I use because it's char by char, V is line by line, Ctrl+v is "block" (you can select chunks across several lines omitting things at the beginning or end of lines).

Ctrl+V to do the block mode is nice if you need to edit the same part of several lines that all line up vertically, you just Ctrl+v, jk to select the lines, then I (shift+i) to insert on all those lines (if you're in vim you can delete things in insert mode also, if you're in vi you'll need to delete first then insert)

I've been using vim as my primary text editor and IDE for near a decade. I forgot that this was a thing so, I've been using visual mode like a peasant.

The real question is why you're torturing yourself by manually fixing that stuff? Don't you terraform your Ansibles?

does this suggest that copy/paste from the terminal is broken by design and we need find a better way?

Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn't inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one's default terminal. Blegh.

Also if you're not going to leverage Vim's main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.

And if you enable the mouse while line numbers are set to be displayed, you can highlight multiple lines without needing to include the line numbers when you paste it later.