tmux does provide full scrollback with mousewheel support too.
# Enable mouse support including scrolling
set -g mouse on
# Versions prior to 2.1 may want this too:
set -g mouse-utf8 on
history-limit 5000 # 5000 lines of history per pane. Adjust as needed.
It's not as good as native scrollback though. For example, by default, as soon as you select something in tmux, the selection goes away, and you have to hit a tmux-specific keybinding to paste it back into the terminal. That's never what I want! If I'm selecting something it's probably because I'm going to copy it to my system keyboard. I think you can disable this part, except of course what you're left with at that point is a tmux selection, which is NOT a terminal selection, meaning you still can't copy it to your system clipboard.
Also, scrolling is somewhat unreliable, although I still haven't figured out why.
In any case, I use tmux in some of my terminal tabs, and very frequently I have to hit ⌘R to disable terminal mouse support just so I can select & copy something without tmux interfering (I could also hold down the Fn key, except I use an external Das Keyboard, and the Das Keyboard folks still haven't figured out that their Fn key should actually behave like Apple's Fn key and let the system know when it's pressed by itself, as opposed to what it does now which is simply modifying the keypress events for other keys without sending any independent event for the Fn key).
Apple's Fn key isn't ideal. The USB HID usage ID is not one from the keyboard or consumer key pages. It's in one of the "vendor defined" pages, meaning that every keyboard driver supporting has to specifically recognize the device vendor and model, because without that context one cannot know what a vendor-defined ID means, and every new keyboard supporting this requires an operating system device driver update across many operating systems as well as system firmware updates to machines whose firmwares recognize this vendor-defined ID as a keyboard key, all to add another vendor ID in to the drivers' lists of "this vendor+device has Apple's Fn key".
Still, Das Keyboard has been making a Mac-specific keyboard for many years now, you'd think they'd at least reach out to Apple to see if they can get their keyboard recognized as having a Fn key (or, alternatively, provide a kext that adds support themselves). But the one time I asked them about it, they didn't seem to even care about how the Fn key behaves, so I doubt they've even made an attempt.
that as the case may be, the same argument applies to vim (i use vim, with at least some of its keyboard shortcut glory, and love it); it might be faster in a lot of cases, but at the end of the day editors like sublime, atom, brackets, etc all have a much larger user base because people aren't willing to learn
No, they're criticising tmux as a proffered alternative to a full-featured terminal emulator, which is often used by non-power user programmers who are not willing to learn (like me).
