This is the single feature I miss the most in any other terminal emulator.
The iTerm2 feature being discussed means that selecting works the same way it does for graphical programs like Gedit or Pycharm or Word — if you select 10 lines you select 10 lines and your window size, font size and visual wrap setting don’t factor into it, and when you paste, you paste what you copied as it was. I would say this is the intuitive and reasonable behavior, but it’s one that is not simple to implement. A visual word wrap should be a purely visual thing and s back to back Cut and Paste should result in nothing changing.
Does that include all trailing whitespace in the rectangle you selected? Should your selection automatically minimize to unselect said trailing whitespace (even before copying, I mean)? Should a selection preserve tab characters or replace them with spaces? What if the selection does not start at a tab boundary, should it ignore or include the half-selected tab instance?
I don't think there is a singular answer to what "copy selection verbatim" means.
Interpretation of intent and “helping” the user are neither needed nor desired, and at best leave everything alone and at worst misinterpret and get in the way.
I have never copied anything out of a terminal and gotten anything other than what I copied when I pasted into sublime text, and I’ve never used iterm2.
Are you talking about copying from a terminal and pasting into OneNote or some other “more than plain text” application or something?