Just add 'set -g mouse on' to your ~/.tmux.conf. You can configure the history size limit by setting 'set-option -g history-limit <lines>'. When you scroll the mouse wheel, tmux will enter copy mode and scroll.
I've never seen a tmux setup that doesn't fail horribly when these two concepts collide (I can't cmd-f search the buffer for interesting things, I don't get a scroll bar on the right that shows me how far up the buffer I am, scroll acceleration doesn't work, etc.)
Terminal.app already does split panes, tabs, scroll acceleration, search, etc. I don't get persistence, but I don't really understand the workflow where you'd want it. I typically open new tabs exactly because I want a fresh workspace, and I close them exactly because I want to clear my workspace. I can just manually call tmux when I know the thing I'm running should outlast a window (and actually, 99% of the time that's on a server I'm SSH'd into, not on my local machine.)
Can anyone convince me why I need to be all-tmux all-the-time?
Perhaps try iTerm2 (for Mac) native tmux integration. You can have tmux panes and split panes that are (and behave like) regular terminal panes and tabs.
If any terminal emulator programmers are listening cough konsolecough please consider following the same method of integration <3
What's the advantage of that exactly?
Less terminal behavior that needs to be multiplexed by tmux?
More integration with other iTerm features (instead of tmux panes being agnostic to them)?
And "doing it faster" is never a concern. As a programmer I write about 5% of what I could type in the same time as a secretary or accountant. Most of the work is thinking.
Plus, the occasional chance to get your hands off of the rigid (and carpal tunnel inducing) pose on the keyboard and move them to the mouse, or vice versa, is welcome.
I don't want to replicate things the mouse does better with keyboard shortcuts, or suffer "modal" input-modes in my programs.
I still prefer not using the mouse for a basic operation like scrolling, thank you.
The kings of keyboard-based cursor movement and text selection are vim and emacs, both of which have a very rich and powerful toolbox of techniques and plugins that help the user do that quickly and efficiently.
For example, emacs has plugins like ace-jump-mode which lets you jump the cursor to any precise position on the screen by typing just one or two keystrokes. vim has similar plugins, like easy-motion and precisejump.
vim and emacs also have quick ways to select words, sentences, paragraphs, functions, lines, logical and visual blocks, the entire document, etc. This includes having full access to rich and powerful regex text matching, which can be used for selection.
In contrast to emacs and vim, when I try to move my cursor and select text in tmux, I feel crippled. So sometimes I do succumb to the temptation of using the mouse to select text in tmux, despite being quite comfortable and satisfied in using the keyboard exclusively in vim and emacs.